Far North Science

Rhodiola grows in the Arctic

They call it Golden Root, a delicate yellow flower from mountain slopes in the European and Asian Arctic that has a storied reputation for boosting mood during the long dark of Siberian winters.

But the mysterious Rhodiola rosea may actually pack for more punch in its pharmacological fist.

A new study from the University of California at Irvine found Rhodiola increased the lifespan of fruit flies, suggesting that this Far North herb prized by Chinese traditional medicine might make people live longer too.

“Flies that ate a diet rich with Rhodiola rosea, an herbal supplement long used for its purported stress-relief effects, lived on an average of 10 percent longer than fly groups that didn’t eat the herb,” states an on-line story published by UCI this week.

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Source: NSIDC

From the prowlings of narwhals and belugas, to the plight of intrepid grass-eating pikas in St. Elias mountain refuges, to the stunning brown-death of 40 million white spruce in Kluane National Park, senior writer Ed Struzik of the Edmonton Herald takes readers on a journey across the Far North in search of climate change impact.

Appearing as The Big Thaw in the Herald and Arctic in Peril in the Toronto Star, the eight-part series (plus photo galleries, interactive maps and commentary) climaxed this week.

Struzik, a 28-year Arctic journalist, was sponsored by the Atkinson Charitable Foundation, the Beland Honderich Family and the Toronto Star. Beginning in July, he made nine Arctic journeys to report the series, according to an update posted online about the 2007 Atkinson Fellowship in Public Policy.

“He travelled by plane, icebreaker, snowmobile, dogsled and skis, making his way from Churchill, Man., to Ellesmere Island, and from the Alaskan border to the coast of Greenland. Struzik saw first-hand evidence that the Arctic is warming almost twice as fast as the rest of the world.”

The multi-media slide show, with audio commentary, are alone worth a few megabytes of time and bandwidth.

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Tara has spent two winters in the ice

Let’s check in on one of the most interesting Far North expeditions now underway — a boat and crew trapped on purpose in the Arctic ice.

In the deep blackness of the polar night, the research schooner Tara and its crew of a dozen well-insulated scientists have been drifting for the past 15 months and now are veering mile by mile with Arctic ice toward the frigid waters of the North Atlantic Ocean.

With a rounded, flat hull, and reinforced structure, the ship embedded itself in polar ice in September of 2006. With scientists measuring ice thickness and taking observations, the boat traveled with floes about 5.7 miles per day during the first 12 months. In the end, Tara has moved about 870 miles across the Arctic — yet actually covered a more than of 2,100 miles due to the zigzag vagaries of the ice cap.

On May 28, the vessel slipped north of 88 North — within 100 miles of the geographic North Pole. Over the summer, the ship began drifting south faster than expected, and could reach open water within the next few weeks. (This emergence is a topic of keen interest to the crew.

“Despite all of the chatter, modeling, predictions and general banter, we just don’t know how things will pan out,” they wrote on Nov. 21. “That’s part of the magic of being stuck up here, to be living in a world that is not governed by bus timetables and the certitudes of what tomorrow will bring.”

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Kittlitz’s murrelet
Source: USFWS / Wikipedia Commons

A mysterious seabird that forages at the face of shrinking tidewater glaciers highlights the 12 Alaska species red-listed as critical by the Audubon’s 2007 Watchlist, released this week and posted online.

The little-known Kittlitz’s murrelet — a species so elusive that scientists didn’t record its croaking call for the first time until a few years ago— has crashed by more than 80 percent since the 1970s throughout its icy range rimming the Gulf of Alaska.

The birds, genetic cousins to puffins and murres, spend summers diving for food in the meltwater rivers that flush from glacial faces, while nesting in the mountains on the ground. Almost nothing is known about their ecology and life cycle — only a few dozen nesting sites have ever been documented and no one really knows much about where the birds spend winters.

Yet the shrinkage of glaciers, and the rapid increase in freshwater at glacial faces, appears to have decimated the bird’s food sources or made it much more difficult to snatch eats. Example: Something like 63,000 murrelets were thought to summer in Prince William Sound in the 1970s. By 2000, the number had dropped to an estimated 1,000.

It’s possible that the world population of the murrelets is now as low as 7,000, according to 2004 estimates.

“The fate of the Kittlitz’s murrelet likely hinges on the fate of Alaska’s glaciers, and therefore may be among the world’s first avian species to succumb to effects of rising global temperatures,” wrote federal biologists John Piatt and Kathy Kuletz in a 2004 scientific paper.

They called it “Alaska’s avian ‘poster child’ for global climate change.”

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Salmon, such as this sockeye, spend years in the ocean
before returning to their home waters to spawn. A newly
launched $4.1 million project aims to make it easier for
scientists to discern populations of salmon from one and
other using the latest genetic techniques.
Source: Thomas Quinn/University of Washington

A sockeye is a sockeye is a sockeye. Agree? One fish, one species, one flippin’ recipe.

Or not. Each individual Nerka return into the thousands of rivers along the Pacific Rim furthers a unique genetic heritage, an unreplicated DNA fingerprint, that spawns a fish unlike any other in the ocean.

Alaskans know this well. Those who desire their red-fleshed protein with a touch of lemon pepper and garlic can hold forth in detail on the differences among salmon.

Slip a chunk of oily Copper River sockeye over the tongue. A slow chew reveals … Fudge. Next fork up some belly meat off a Kenai River red. It’s firm and wholesome, filling. But wait. What about the Coghill River reds that cross Prince William Sound? Or Copper River’s Gulkana, Klutina and Tonsina fish? Or the Tustumena-bound sockeyes swimming the Kasilof?

So many flavors, so few barbecues.

To help all of us Pacific humans keep track of (and conserve) the myriad varieties of our Pacific salmon, a team of scientists at the University of Washington have launched an ambitious project to decipher this wild encyclopedia of DNA and then share the index.

“A $4.1 million effort just launched by UW’s School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences aims to help by gathering genetic information for thousands upon thousands of Pacific Rim salmon populations and creating open-access databases for managers, treaty-makers and scientists,” according to a UW online story.

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

A high-tech vault built 400 feet inside permafrost and solid rock on the Arctic coast of Spitzbergen Island has started to cool down its sandstone chambers to zero degrees Farhenheit in preparation for an incredible mission:

Archive up to 4.5 million seeds — the genetic source for all of the crops that feed humanity — in an ultimate fail-safe, blast-proof and climate-change immune chamber.

The Global Crop Diversity Trust announced that it has completed construction of the doomsday vault and has started the two-month countdown to ready the facility to protect the world’s agricultural heritage against extinction and calamity.

“The seed vault is the perfect place for keeping seeds safe for centuries,” said Cary Fowler, Executive Director of the Rome-based group, which has partnered with Norway and the Nordic Gene Bank on the establishment of the vault. “At these (frigid) temperatures, seeds for important crops like wheat, barley and peas can last for up to 10,000 years.”

“We really want this facility to inspire, to stand out as a highly visible monument to the often obscure but very important mission of conserving humanity’s agriculture heritage,” added Mr. Terje Riis-Johansen, Norway’s Minister of Agriculture and Food.

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Storms have undercut houses in Shishmaref
Source: Shishmaref Relocation Coalition

It’s the return of an annual erosion nightmare for Alaskans living in barrier island villages along the Chukchi Sea. Once again, Shishmaref faces another storm with potential to consume more its diminishing beach.

A legacy of the 2007 record meltback of sea ice, a vast expanse of open ocean now stretches for hundreds of miles off Alaska’s Northwest coast. (See the current sea ice analysis.) The relatively warm fall weather has not built shore-fast shelves of ice that could armor the beaches from surf. Add in a 40 mph north gusts and the possibility of 12-foot waves against exposed permafrost of the beach bluffs — and Shishmaref may suffer yet more damage to a sea wall intended to buy time until the village can move to a safer location.

“Everybody’s kind of anxious, but we’ll just have to see what the storm does, I guess,” said Tony Weyiouanna, Shishmaref’s transportation planner, told the Anchorage Daily News in a story published Thursday. “This is supposed to be one of the worst storms so far for this year.”

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Steller Seal Lion
NMML photo library

Summer counts of Steller sea lions along Alaska’s rugged coast suggests the Far North’s most endangered pinniped may be continuing a slow recovery that first appeared three years ago.

But gnarly weather hampered the 2007 surveys and kept biologists from visiting some sites. Combine that difficulty with continued declines at certain central and western Aleutian locales, and the overall prognosis for the species remains very much guarded, according to a memo released this week by the National Marine Fisheries Service.

Still, this “mixed” news contrasts sharply with the precipitous plunge of the 1980s, when the number of sea lions between the Gulf of Alaska and the tip of the Aleutian chain seemed trapped in a population tumble that scientists could not explain and managers could not derail.

“Looking at western stock trends since 2004, our surveys show mixed results — increases here and decreases there — but the overall picture indicates that the Steller sea lion population west of Cape Saint Elias in 2007 was similar in size to the population in 2004,” said Doug DeMaster, director of the Alaska Fisheries Science Center in a press release from NOAA Fisheries.

“This year’s count, while incomplete, supports that big-picture impression.”

1978: Before the decline
Sea lions on Middleton Island
NOAA photo library

Declines are more prominent in the western part of the survey area, with some gains appearing further eastward.

The 2007 count in the Central Gulf of Alaska, from the central Kenai Peninsula through the Semidi Islands, is the first showing a population increase since the 1970s, when the time series began.

Even such an inconclusive finding offers good news in Alaska’s epic sea lion saga, a high seas conundrum that evolved into one of the most intractable scientific problems in the history of the North Pacific marine management.

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