Far North Science

House topples during Shishmaref storm
Shishmaref Relocation Coalition

Anchorage filmmaker Jan-Pieter Welt has continued work on “2nd Order Science,” a documentary begun in 1992 that tracks changing perceptions among scientists about climate change.

Welt talked to academics about global climate change and recorded their thoughts at a time when the juggernaut of sea ice retreat and rapid warming had barely begun.

“Now, 15 years later, we’re going back to re-interview the same people to see what they’ve learned since,” Welt writes in an email message.

Welt has posted a 31-minute preview of the film online.

The original inspiration? “It was obvious to us in the late eighties that the shit was going to hit the climate change fan in the not-too-distant future,” he writes.

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NSIDC — 2005

The overall trend for Arctic Ocean sea ice cover has declined every month for 27 years in a loss driven both by natural cycles and the steady rise in greenhouse gas concentrations.

Supercomputing climate models — where scientists wrestle a universe of data about human emissions and weather through a galaxy of equations — now show uncanny matches to the real world of floes and open leads.

All this cogitation conjures a startling scenario: the Arctic Ocean will soon be free of ice during late summer, possibly as soon as 2040 and almost certainly by 2100.

USFWS

“Given the agreement between models and observations, a transition to a seasonally ice-free Arctic Ocean as the system warms seems increasingly certain,” according to new review by senior climate scientist Mark Serreze and researcher Julienne Stroeve with the National Snow and Ice Data Center, and Marika Holland from the National Center for Atmospheric Research.

“The unresolved questions regard when this new arctic state will be realized, how rapid the transition will be, and what will be the impacts of this new state on the Arctic and the rest of the globe.”

And don’t be thinking in terms of some glacial, geologic-speed shift.

“This transition to a new arctic state may be rapid once the ice thins to a more vulnerable state,” the three authors write in Perspectives on the Arctic’s Shrinking Sea-Ice Cover, published March 16 in the journal of Science.

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The web wizards at the National Snow and Ice Data Center have concocted an interactive online map for exploring the Far North or, (if you’re someone with more austral tastes), the Far South.

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A Russian volcano network that warned airliners winging over the North Pacific of potential hazards went silent March 1 due to budget cuts, increasing the risk that aircraft could enter undetected ash clouds and experience sudden catastrophic engine failure during a trans-ocean flight, according to the Alaska Volcano Observatory.

Klyuchevskoy Volcano erupts in Oct. 1994
NASA / USGS KVERT Fact Sheet

Without alerts issued by the Kamchatkan Volcanic Eruption Respnse Team (KVERT), jetliners flying between North America and Asia could get little or no warning if any of the 29 active volcanoes on the Kamchatka Peninsula erupt and send ash clouds roiling into air traffic lanes, particularly during bad weather or other conditions where satellite coverage was unable to pinpoint the plume.

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Pioneer spruce in Burwash Uplands
University of Alberta

As creeping saplings, they suck water and steal nutrients. They block the sun with their prickly needles. And their looming presence finally annihilates shrubby alpine competitors with spruce-like indifference.

OK, maybe this arboreal drama from the Kluane Ranges in southwestern Yukon Territory won’t make it as a matinee thriller. But a new innovative study by University of Alberta scientists found white spruce invading mountain tundra with surprising speed, pushing the tree line higher in elevation much faster than expected in response to climate change.

Once the summer warmth hit a certain level — the forest essentially pounced.

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The route of Barrenlands Traverse

A team of scientists and Native observers are poised to embark on a 3,000-kilometer (1,864-mile) snowmachine journey across the tundra of Alaska and Canada, from Fairbanks to Baker Lake in the far reaches of Nunavut.

Along the way, the five Americans and three Canadians will visit dozens of historic Arctic sites, 11 villages and two diamond mines. They will stop to take detailed measurements of snow and climate, visit schools, gather traditional knowledge — and then share their insights with students and teachers across the world through daily on-line dispatches.

It’s SnowSTAR 2007: Barrenlands Traverse.

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When a species goes extinct, sometimes fossils can be found, remains uncovered. The presence of DNA might allow scientists to decipher the biological essence. We know the Stegosaurus. We can study the Wooly Mammoth.

But when a human language disappears, especially one spoken by indigenous tribal people, there’s rarely any key left behind. For most of the world’s 6,000 languages, writing samples are sparse, recordings rare. One by one, they’re going silent. Each loss becomes a linguistic black hole, where an entire way of knowing the world gets trapped out of hearing, gone forever.

Nearly all of them could be extinct in the next two centuries, says University of Alaska Fairbanks professor emeritus Michael Krauss.

“I claim that it is catastrophic for the future of mankind,” Krauss said during a session on the phenomena of extinction at the American Association for the Advancement of Science annual meeting in San Francisco. “It should be as scary as losing 90 percent of the biological species.”

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Photo courtesy Jeff Pederson
UAF Geophysical Institute
Arctic Science Journeys

With a dazzling display dancing across the sky over Alaska, a NASA sounding rocket blasted from Poker Flat Research Range this week to penetrate the aurora in an investigation of its mysterious energy waves.

In the last launch of Poker Flat’s season, a NASA Black Brant XII rocket lifted off at 11:39 p.m. on Feb. 27 with a payload of sensitive instruments in an experiment named CHARM, led by Jim LaBelle, a professor of physics and astronomy at Dartmouth College.

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