Far North Science

Crab Nebula
Courtesy of Neil Davis

Texans are known as braggarts, but in the arena of geography, they can’t start to compete with Alaskans who can brag about the facts that we are the biggest state, the northernmost state, the westernmost state, and the easternmost state, plus we have the longest coastline of any state, and we own the highest mountain.

We’ve also got more volcanoes, glaciers, swamps and even bigger mosquitoes than Texas, for whatever that’s worth.

However, when it comes to astronomical bragging, we don’t do so well. We do have the aurora, of course, but otherwise we are astronomically challenged on several counts.

For one thing, half the year we can’t even see the stars because of perpetual daylight. Then, for the other half of the year, it is no fun to stand out in the cold looking at them through a telescope all frosted up from the viewer’s breath.

Furthermore, stuck like we are up near the North Pole, we rotate around on the earth’s axis unable to see a great portion of the firmament, that grand spectacle containing all its galaxies filled with untold numbers of stars, planets, interstellar gases and who knows what else.

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The pliosaur would have ruled the sea More images from the project
Artwork by Tor Sponga, BT

Forget Jurassic Park and those cuddly velociraptors. For a real prehistoric nightmare, check out what an international team of scientists unearthed last year in the far north Atlantic island group of Svalbard.

With jaws large to munch a modern killer whale and flippers as wide as airplane wings, this ancient marine predator would have stretched 15 meters from snout to stern — as long as a one of those mondo trailers hauled behind a semi.

So don’t blame the scientists for nicknaming the beast “The Monster.”

“After months of preparing and conserving the specimen at the Natural History Museum at the University of Oslo, researchers confirmed their earlier suspicions: the 150-million-year-old Jurassic marine reptile is perhaps the largest ever found,” according to the University of Alaska Museum of the North.

“This is one of the largest and relatively complete plesiosaur specimens ever found,” says earth sciences curator Patrick Druckenmiller, who spent several weeks last summer working with a Norwegian research team on the excavation.

“Its discovery in Svalbard also demonstrates that these gigantic animals inhabited the northern seas during the age of dinosaurs.”

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A drawing of the Svalbard Seed Vault
Source: Global Seed Trust

By the tens of thousands, the seeds will come: strains of Mexican maize, sturdy varieties of African wheat, Southeast Asian rice that feeds the masses. They’re what one scientist calls “the crown jewels” of the world’s agricultural heritage, all of them on now getting packaged at facilities around the world for shipping to Svalbard, in the Norwegian Arctic.

Destination? What may be the world’s most secure biological archive, a climate-controlled vault blasted into solid rock and permafrost as a place to forever house samples in the event of war, drought or ecological disaster.

It’s called the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, what some have started calling the Doomsday Vault. Constructed over the past year, and powered up in November by the Global Crop Diversity Trust, the facility will begin its seed-protection mission in February 2008.

“Our ability to endow this facility with such an impressive array of diversity is a powerful testament to the incredible work of scientists at our centers, who have been so dedicated to ensuring the survival of the world’s most important crop species,” said Emile Frison, director general of Rome-based Bioversity International, a sponsor of the project.

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The antenna array at HAARP outside Gakona
Source: HAARP

How long does it take to radio the Moon? 2.4 seconds.

Radar pulses from the HAARP research station outside Gakona in Alaska’s Copper River basin have been bounced off the moon and picked up by a radio telescope system in New Mexico — the lowest frequency radar echo from the moon ever detected on the home planet.

The signals, beamed skyward from antennas at the sometimes controversial High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program, zapped the moon in a manner somewhat like sonar, and then illuminated secrets of the ionosphere as they returned to Earth.

These pulses were then caught by newly developed receivers at the Longwave Length Array in the New Mexico desert, an ongoing project to create a ground-breaking (and inexpensive) radio telescope that will listen to space for as-yet unknown low frequency signals. (Motto: “Catching Big Waves with small blades.”)

“Detecting the very weak radio signals after their round trip to the moon and back was challenging and required careful modification of the LWA antennas to improve their performance at these frequencies,” says NRL Remote Sensing Division scientist, Dr. Kenneth Stewart.

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The Russian nuclear icebreaker 50 let Pobedy (right) cuts a path
through the Arctic ice for the Swedish icebreaker Oden (left)
during the 2007 LOMROG expedition.
Image courtesy of Ohio State University

The Arctic has revealed yet another mystery: Colossal mud waves that form 100-foot-wide ripples across the ocean floor, plus ancient tracks carved by half-mile-deep glaciers. Who knew?

A team of scientists working to trace the impact of prehistoric ice sheets on Arctic Ocean bathymetry have uncovered sonar images and measurements that show startling formations in waters long thought too deep and too serene.

Although powerful currents can create a wavy surface on the ocean floor, scientists always thought the Arctic was too calm, according to a new online story by the Ohio State University.

And so far, no one has been able to explain how the waves got formed, says research scientist Leonid Polyak, from the Byrd Polar Research Center.

“The mud waves could be caused by tidal fluctuations,” he said. “But that’s really just speculation at this point.”

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Some of the 18 red king crabs collected by commercial fishermen
under a state permit to study what’s needed to hatch and raise large
numbers of red king crab in a hatchery. The research is being carried
out by the Alaska King Crab Research, Rehabilitation and Biology
(AKCRRAB) program, and will help policymakers decide whether to use
hatcheries to rebuild Kodiak area red king crab stocks.
Photo : Celeste Leroux, Alaska Sea Grant

Alaska scientists allied with fishermen have gathered giant red king crab in a quest to raise them in a lab and learn how to trigger new population growth in the wild.

It’s groundbreaking research, aimed at figuring out the ecological and biological secrets behind a species that once drove commercial fishing in the Gulf of Alaska and the Bering Sea.

“Six crabs were shipped alive from Bristol Bay to the NOAA Kodiak Laboratory, and 12 crabs were delivered to the University of Alaska’s lab in Seward,” Ginny Eckert, a University of Alaska Fairbanks scientist leading the studies, told Alaska Sea Grant.

“Over the coming months we and our partners in Kodiak and the Alutiiq Pride Shellfish Hatchery in Seward will learn more about how to keep adults alive and healthy as they progress toward hatching their eggs in the spring. Once the eggs hatch, we’ll study the diet and environmental needs of crab growing from larval up through to the juvenile stages.”

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Pink salmon fry infected with sea lice.
Credit: Alexandra Morton

Lice infestations that originated in fish farms off British Columbia will almost certainly drive certain natural pink salmon runs to extinction within a few years, according to a new study published this week in the journal of Science.

The findings add to evidence that raising salmon and other fish in ocean pens, banned from Alaska and controversial in the Pacific Northwest, can cause environmental damage and spread nonindigenous stocks, disease or parasites into wild populations. The study has already garnered extensive coverage by media, especially in Canada, and detailed critiques from the aquaculture industry and some academics.

The Vancouver Sun covered the study in depth in this dispatch.

The article’s authors, including University of Alberta researcher Martin Krkosek and B.C.’s Alexandra Morton, looked at 37 years’ worth of Fisheries and Oceans data for 71 central coast rivers and found that wild pink runs have comfortably withstood decades of commercial fishing — but cannot survive fish farms.

“We have seen is a very rapid four year decline in the pink salmon populations in the Broughton,” Krkosek said in an interview earlier this week.

“Based on that measured rate of decline, which is real, we can expect that in another four years those fish will be all gone if the sea lice infestations continue.”

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Modern gray wolf
Credit: Wikipedia Creative Commons

Thus read the headline of the Jan. 26, 1950 edition of the Anchorage Daily News. Longtime Alaskan man of God Everett Bachelder had been driving a team of dogs from Palmer to the Copper Basin with a load of supplies and gifts for orphans and needy families when wolves surrounded his outfit stalled in deep snow near Sheep Mountain, near the headwaters of the Matanuska River.

“An Alaskan missionary today revealed how he made a harrowing escape from death when hungry wolves surrounded his dog team on a crosscountry trek from Wasilla to Chitina,” the story reads.

“His dogs were devoured, and he had to keep a campfire going throughout every night to save himself from the vicious beasts.”

Bachelder survived, of course, going on to serve many years as a missionary in Nome. And times have changed in the past half century — no longer do people cast wolves in absurdly purple terms like ‘vicious beasts.’

But it’d be an equally absurd mistake to see wolves — those magnificent, intelligent and socially sophisticated predators — as spiritual creatures guided by ecological action-plans that target only the infirm and weak. The animals have a mission from God: Eat meat. And that can mean killing dogs.

One of the four wolf packs known to roam Alaska’s largest municipality — animals that often prowl within sight of humans on Anchorage trails — has been stalking and attacking pets running lose near owners. In two of the four incidents reported this week by the Anchorage Daily News, dogs were actually consumed. Dogs have also been killed recently by wolves in Fairbanks.

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