Far North Science

Atmospheric scientist Cathy Cahill points to two
recent air samples from Baghdad, one showing
dust and the other fine trapped particles from
burned diesel fuel. Photo by Ned Rozell

This column is provided as a public service by the Geophysical Institute, University of Alaska Fairbanks, in cooperation with the UAF research community. Ned Rozell is a science writer at the institute.

Cathy Cahill got a package in the mail last week from a desert on the other side of the world. She didn’t know what was inside, but she hoped it was air samples from Baghdad. When she opened the package, she didn’t believe her eyes.

“I’ve never seen that much dust (on a slide used for air sampling),” she said. “There’s so much that it’s flaking off.”

Cahill, who works at the Geophysical Institute at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, studies air quality in Alaska and all over the world. In November, Pam Clark of the U.S. Army Research Lab in Adelphi, Maryland, asked Cahill if she could deploy a few air samplers at Army camps in Iraq, as part of an Army program to study the air in places where military members are stationed.

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A barred owl in Juneau. Unknown in Alaska
before the late 1970s, barred owls are now
the second most-abundant owl in Southeast.
Photo by Paul Suchanek.

This column is provided as a public service by the Geophysical Institute, University of Alaska Fairbanks, in cooperation with the UAF research community. Ned Rozell is a science writer at the institute.

The barred owl, once a rarity in Alaska, is now one of the most common owls in Southeast Alaska. The 20-inch owl with a call that sounds like “Who cooks for me? Who cooks for you all!” is a common forest resident east of the Great Plains, but has been on the move lately.

In the 20th century, the owls expanded westward and northward, with the first documented sighting near Juneau in 1978. Michelle Kissling of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in Juneau reported that researchers found about 13 barred owls from 1978 to 1990, but from 2000 to the present, they found more than 100, making the barred owl the second most common owl in Southeast.

The most common owl in Southeast is the northern saw-whet owl, which sounds like the owl version of a large truck backing up.

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Kenji Yoshikawa drills a hole to monitor permafrost
in the Seward Peninsula village of Wales.
Photo by Ned Rozell

This column is provided as a public service by the Geophysical Institute, University of Alaska Fairbanks, in cooperation with the UAF research community. Ned Rozell is a science writer at the institute.

Fifteen days, 15 villages, more than 800 miles traveled by snowmachine, and Kenji Yoshikawa’s spring permafrost tour, phase 1, is complete.

From Emmonak, a village at the Yukon’s mouth where he found no permafrost, to Shishmaref, a village just south of the Arctic Circle with what he considers “cold” permafrost, Yoshikawa now has a better idea of what lies beneath western Alaska. This understanding is just in time to help other permafrost researchers flesh out a permafrost map of Alaska in time for a summer conference here in Fairbanks.

For the record, Yoshikawa found no permafrost where he drilled in villages at the mouth of the Yukon–Emmonak and Kotlik. Farther north, in Stebbins and St. Michael, he found permafrost, including “very warm” permafrost at St. Michael.

“This will be a perfect location to watch for changes in the next 10 to 15 years,” he said of St. Michael.

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The Iditarod trail between the Seward Peninsula
villages of Elim and Golovin. Kenji Yoshikawa is
traveling along part of the trail to visit schools
and install permafrost boreholes.
Photo by Ned Rozell.

This column is provided as a public service by the Geophysical Institute, University of Alaska Fairbanks, in cooperation with the UAF research community. Ned Rozell is a science writer at the institute.

WHITE MOUNTAIN, Alaska — The University of Alaska Fairbanks’ Kenji Yoshikawa is making a snowmachine journey from Emmonak, at the mouth of the Yukon, to Kotzebue, about 800 trail miles away. Tohru Saito of the International Arctic Research Center and I are traveling with him. Here’s how Kenji’s day went today:

7 a.m. — He wakes on the floor of the Elim school library, under a sign that says “You will not get your way when you: holler, whine, yell, ignore, demand, or lay on the floor.”

9 a.m. — Kenji tells the three junior-high-age students in a science class about permafrost, then takes them outside to look at a “frost tube,” clear surgical tubing with blue water inside that fits inside a borehole and turns cloudy when it freezes. Students will use it to tell how deep the ground freezes.

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A sunset over Norton Sound
as seen from the village of Stebbins.
Photo by Ned Rozell.

This column is provided as a public service by the Geophysical Institute, University of Alaska Fairbanks, in cooperation with the UAF research community. Ned Rozell is a science writer at the institute.

STEBBINS — ”There’s no permafrost here, like there was none in Emmonak,” Kenji Yoshikawa said earlier today, when he was in the village of Kotlik. “Isn’t that interesting?”

The adventuring permafrost scientist was in that small Yupik village near the mouth of the Yukon River, drilling a hole in the soil on the treeless tundra near the school. Though the top layer of soil was frozen, a few feet down it was as gooey as cold pudding.

Yoshikawa, from the University of Alaska Fairbanks, was on a spring snowmachine traverse of western Alaska, from Emmonak at the mouth of the Yukon River to Native villages on Norton Sound and up to Kotzebue, tracing the nose of the Seward Peninsula. He and his helpers and traveling companions — Tohru Saito of the International Arctic Research Center and me — will try to drill 15 permafrost-monitoring holes in two weeks.

After starting in Emmonak a few days ago, we’ll make our way by snowmachine to Kotzebue, putting more than 800 miles on them.

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Hairy catsear is an invasive plant that is spreading into Alaska.
Photo courtesy U.S. Forest Service.

This column is provided as a public service by the Geophysical Institute, University of Alaska Fairbanks, in cooperation with the UAF research community. Ned Rozell is a science writer at the institute.

With only five roads connecting it to the outside world, and a small number of airports and seaports, Alaska is more like an island than the peninsula it is. That isolation has helped save Alaska from the widespread invasion of non-native plants, but exotics are finding their way in.

In 1968, Eric Hulten documented about 175 exotic plant species in Alaska. During a 2006 count of Alaska plants, researchers came up with about 275 plants new to the state. Those plants have made it into the state as their seeds have hitchhiked in on vehicles and by other means. Alaskans have also imported non-native seeds in bales of hay and potted soil.

Jeff Conn has studied the latter two pathways for weeds to gain access into Alaska. He is a weed specialist with the USDA Agricultural Research Service who also is an affiliate faculty member at the University of Alaska Fairbanks.

Conn, Casie Stockdale, and Jennifer Morgan purchased bales of hay and straw from Alaska feed stores and then shook out the bales over screens.

After seeds fell onto the screens, they planted them, and up popped 15 weed species not known to grow in Alaska, along with 17 types that already grow here.

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Embedded iron particles surrounded by carbonized
rings in the outer layer of a mammoth tusk from
Alaska. Inset photo shows how an object ripped
through the tusk.
Image courtesy Richard Firestone.

This column is provided as a public service by the Geophysical Institute, University of Alaska Fairbanks, in cooperation with the UAF research community. Ned Rozell is a science writer at the institute.

A giant meteor may have exploded over Alaska thousands of years ago, shooting out metal fragments like buckshot, some of which embedded in the tusks of woolly mammoths and the horns of bison.

Simultaneously, a large chunk of the meteor hit Alaska south of Allakaket, sending up a dust cloud that blacked out the sun over the entire state and surrounding areas, killing most of the life in the area.

Such is the scenario envisioned by Rick Firestone, a staff scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California. Firestone and his colleagues have found mammoth tusks and a bison skull with nickel-rich iron particles in them on one side, suggesting the metal fragments all came from the same direction.

Firestone’s theory emerged when his colleague, Alan West of Dewey, Arizona, saw at a Phoenix gem and mineral show a mammoth tusk peppered with tiny bits of metal.

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After holding water for centuries, Iceberg Lake
in the Wrangell-St. Elias Mountains drained in
1999 and has lost its water every year since
except 2001.
Photo by Mike Loso.

This column is provided as a public service by the Geophysical Institute, University of Alaska Fairbanks, in cooperation with the UAF research community. Ned Rozell is a science writer at the institute.

Not too long ago, a lake sprung a leak in the high country of the Wrangell-St. Elias Mountains. The lake drained away, as glacier-dammed lakes often do, but this lake was a bit different, and seems to be telling a story about a warmer Alaska.

The lake, known as Iceberg Lake to people in McCarthy, about 50 airmails to the north, had been part of the landscape for as long as people could remember. Pinched by glacial ice, the three-mile-long, one-mile-wide lake on the northern boundary of the Bagley Icefield was remote but notable enough that it was the cover photo for a recent book about hiking Wrangell-St. Elias National Park.

When McCarthy guide Richard Villa visited the area with a client in the summer of 1999, he was stunned to see the lake, which had lost much of its water. Villa later told Mike Loso, a Kennicott resident part of the year and now a professor at Alaska Pacific University in Anchorage.

Loso flew to the lake the next summer with Bob Anderson and Dan Doak, scientists who also reside in McCarthy for part of the year. The men saw a muddy lakebed where Iceberg Lake had sat for so long.

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