As another major rainstorm hit California in February, downtown San Francisco surpassed its normal rain total for an entire year. Reservoirs in the high country were spilling over. So ended a five-year drought in the state that some people attributed to human-caused climate change.

Those pictures of dried-up California lakes bothered Syun-Ichi Akasofu, who recently gave a talk, “The Forthcoming Ice Age,” at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. He thinks we humans are perhaps living in a period of warmth between cold periods, and we consider it normal. Mankind’s effects on climate, he said, are a minor act in a much grander play.

Akasofu, who an Anchorage Daily News reporter a decade ago called “Alaska’s best known climate-change skeptic,” is now 86. Every weekday, he walks into the rear entrance of a building with his name on it (home to the International Arctic Research Center) and works in his modest partitioned space until early afternoon.

He came to Alaska from Japan in 1958 to study the aurora. He became a worldwide expert, and transitioned to people-and-budget management as director of the Geophysical Institute and later the International Arctic Research Center. He was essential in the birth of the latter, now a major UAF institution, by bringing in funding from Japan in the late 1990s.

Since he was a boy, Akasofu has been a contrarian, finding himself looking for an alternative explanation when many people agree on an unproven notion. He has spent many hours of his retirement looking for cracks in the argument of the importance of humanity’s role in global warming, one of the noisiest debates of his time.

Upon reading of the drought-ending rains in California, Akasofu said that state is experiencing natural changes that come and go in cycles. His pet peeve is “instant climatology,” in which he says people base an argument on just a few decades of data.

The time period one chooses, he said, support or refute a favorite argument. From 1940 to 1975, he pointed out, the average temperature on Earth decreased 0.2 degrees F, making some believe a new ice age was coming.

Global warming from 1975 on is real, he said, and he agrees that carbon dioxide levels are increasing dramatically. But he thinks warming world temperatures could be mainly Earth’s natural rebound from the Little Ice Age, a period from A.D. 1200 to 1850 when during some winters the Thames River froze in London and so did New York Harbor.

Any measure of change has to begin at some time period. Akasofu wonders why scientists like Michael Mann used the year A.D. 1000 to initiate his famous “hockey stick” graph, which shows incredible warming in the past 80 years.

“There’s a big baseline problem,” he said. “You can draw a line at (A.D. 1000) to the present to promote the hockey stick, but if you go back 500,000 years, there were four ice ages, and we’re on the cusp of another.”

He showed a graph of warmth that follows ice ages, noting that we are perhaps at the cyclical peak of heat that has happened with regularity in the planet’s history.

If he is right, we are living in a sweet spot, warm enough for human comfort, embedded in a pattern we have little to do with. His line that follows the temperature swings involved with the major ice ages has the world’s average temperature increasing until about 2035, when it drops to about the same level as 1990.

“The public should be aware that we are at the peak of this change (the warm recovery from a past ice age),” he said. “We are luckily at the peak of an impulsive heat input.”

As for today being different than yesterday, he said, it is the natural state of things.

“Climate change is happening all the time,” he said. “We should respect nature and its power.” 

Since the late 1970s, the University of Alaska Fairbanks’ Geophysical Institute has provided this column free in cooperation with the UAF research community. Ned Rozell is a science writer for the Geophysical Institute.

When the Iditarod’s start moved from Anchorage to Fairbanks this year, the race’s head veterinary technician needed to quickly rally a team of volunteers who could be fast with the furriest.

So Tabitha Jones turned to students in the collaborative professional veterinary medicine program that the University of Alaska Fairbanks and Colorado State University began two years ago.

She knew the students were experienced dog handlers who could “chip check” about 1,100 sled dogs in the few hours before the race began. Many of them had proven their chip-checking skills in the Yukon Quest.

“I figured the vet students would love to help, and they’re good with animals,” she said. “There’s a lot of them, and I need a lot of them because most of my volunteers are back in Anchorage.”

Jones figured right — the vet students wanted to help with the “last great race on Earth,” in which mushers race nearly 1,000 miles to Nome.

Thirteen students arrived at 8 a.m. Monday on race day, while the sun was still low and temperatures of about minus 35 degrees Fahrenheit blanketed the area in deep cold.

Over the next several hours, 71 dog teams pulled into a large, circular clearing, like spokes in a wheel. The veterinary students helped visit the teams in pairs — one armed with a scanner and the other carrying a clipboard and pencil. There were no pens because the ink would freeze.

“Our role was to scan the dogs for microchips to help with identification on the trail and with record keeping,” said veterinary student Amanda Grimes.

As part of the gig, the group met dogs and dog lovers from all around the world, including places such as Kotzebue, England, France and Norway. Mushers brought the dogs out to be scanned, or students scanned the dogs in the mushers’ specialized trucks.

Occasionally, when fingers chilled to uselessness, the students would sit in a centrally parked gray van with heat blasting from the vents.

While there, Jenny Klecka explained what it meant to be volunteering at such an iconic Alaska event.

“This is a big deal,” said the veterinary student. “I grew up in Alaska so I would always follow the Iditarod. It’s really cool to be a part of this because it feels like I’m surrounded by celebrities.”

Veterinary student Liz Millman feels the same way, although her celebrities are the dogs.

She said they’re the foremost endurance athletes of their kind and rival many other species.

“Dog sledding is our state sport, and these dogs are not typical pets,” she said. “This is a good opportunity for students to meet these athletes and see how fit they are, how they work together and how they’re cared for.”

Millman, who aspires to be a sled dog veterinarian in Alaska, organized the veterinary students at Jones’ request.

She came to Alaska from Wisconsin three years ago to work with Iditarod veteran DeeDee Jonrowe. Millman learned how to train sled dogs, care for them and pack for the trail.

She also volunteered at the Iditarod’s checkpoints and gained acceptance into UAF-CSU’s inaugural class. Now, she’s sharing her Iditarod experience with fellow veterinary students.

She even helped several of them become part of a 16-volunteer team that brought Jonrowe’s dogs to the start of the Iditarod.

Each student was assigned a dog to walk in a procession of stop-and-go as teams left the start. Although the 16 dogs were connected to a network of ropes that binds them into one team, the volunteers helped keep the dogs from tangling the lines.

It’s an experience like none other and one that veterinary student Victoria Hammer said gives her bragging rights for years to come.

“We made it to the start line, which is my favorite part of the event; there are hardly words to describe what happens there,” she said. “The dogs are all excited, most barking, pulling and some jumping, but when the announcer yells ‘Go!’ and the handlers let go … silence … as the dogs instantly switch from ‘primed and ready’ to ‘I have a job to do.’”

With dogs’ breath fogging the 30-below-zero air at their knees, 71 Iditarod mushers steamed their way down the frozen Chena River in Fairbanks on March 6. Upstream, just a few miles behind them, 500 ducks were surviving in a one-mile stretch of open water.

You might think the mallards that did not migrate from the sub-Arctic in fall would be skinny and weak, but a University of Alaska Fairbanks graduate student found the ducks have the highest midwinter body mass of just about any mallards in North America. And the ducks improved in body condition since their brethren flew away.

Tim Spivey just defended his master’s thesis on the hundreds of mallards that spend winters in Anchorage and Fairbanks, unlike most of a half-million Alaska mallards that flew south months ago.

The mallard is the raven of the duck world, able to eat just about anything. Mallards have overwintered in Anchorage since at least 1975. There are now about 1,300 mallards there. The Fairbanks population of mallards has increased to about 500 overwintering ducks since people began feeding them in organized fashion.

Spivey found the body condition of Anchorage mallards declined from autumn to late winter. Fairbanks ducks, however, reached their highest body mass during November, December and January, the coldest months of the year.

Ducks live in the two cities all winter because of two key factors: There is open water in both places, and people feed them.

In Fairbanks, workers at the city’s main coal-fired power plant discharge equipment-cooling water into the Chena River, warming it enough that a mile-long section downstream does not freeze. Volunteers haul as many as eight 5-gallon buckets of corn and wheat to the riverbank each winter day to feed the ducks.

Marv Hassebroek, 81, has fed the ducks a mixture of cracked corn, Delta wheat and feed pellets for about 12 years. At that time, he and the late Bill Stroecker saw mallards that “looked like they were starving to death.

“Bill used to say ‘I shot more ducks than anybody in Fairbanks, now I’m going to make up for it,'” Hassebroek said.

To test how much of that six-month daily gift made up the Fairbanks mallards’ winter diet, Spivey captured ducks and took blood samples and banded their legs before releasing them.

Using isotope analysis on the blood samples, Spivey found human handouts make up 85 percent of an urban mallard’s diet by late winter. A natural diet for mallards includes seeds and berries, small fish and invertebrates in the water.

Spivey said some people feel the ducks will die without the help.
Hassebroek acknowledged that as he hauled a few 5-gallon buckets of grain to the Chena, where a few dozen ducks amid hundreds quacked at his arrival.

“If we didn’t feed them, they’d be dead in a week, maybe a couple weeks,” he said.

“That’s not the case,” Spivey said a few days earlier during his thesis defense. “They’ll migrate to chase resource availability.”

In his research, Spivey also checked out ducks to see whether active infections were happening in the urban-wintering mallards. He found the Fairbanks mallards maintained the influenza A virus during winter when most dabbling ducks have left, which biologists think is significant.

“Wintering mallards could conceivably play a role in the perpetuation of extremely economically costly poultry pathogens in Alaska,” said Andy Ramey, an expert on avian flu with the U.S. Geological Survey Science Center in Anchorage via email. These viruses “have the potential to cause disease not only among domestic poultry, but also in pet or backyard birds and numerous species of wild birds, including raptors.”

There are pluses and minuses for mallards remaining in Alaska over the winter, Spivey said. Downsides are the increased chance of maintaining the viral reservoir and a dependence on a human-granted food supply. Upsides include avoiding the many dangers of migration and having shorter commutes to summer nesting areas in places like the Minto Flats, Susitna Flats and Innoko River.

Since the late 1970s, the University of Alaska Fairbanks’ Geophysical Institute has provided this column free in cooperation with the UAF research community. Ned Rozell is a science writer for the Geophysical Institute.

Registration is open for the Alaska Wood Energy Conference, which will meet April 11-12 in Ketchikan.

Conference organizer Karen Petersen of the University of Alaska Fairbanks Cooperative Extension Service said the biennial conference will focus on how wood energy can help Alaska with its energy challenges.

Conference topics will include biomass harvesting and production, Canadian biomass projects and policies, carbon credits, air quality concerns and case studies of existing biomass operations. Optional activities will include tours of woody biomass operations in and around Ketchikan on April 10 and biomass-heated greenhouses on Prince of Wales Island on April 13.

Conference details and registration information are available at www.uaf.edu/ces/nrcd/awec. Co-sponsors include the UAF Cooperative Extension Service, Alaska Energy Authority and U.S. Forest Service. For more information, contact Karen Petersen at khpetersen@alaska.edu or at 907-821-2681.

If only the Martians had a TripAdvisor noting their five-star hangouts on the red, dusty planet.

The review titles might read, “Water are you waiting for?”, “Feel the burn” and “Acid washing — it’s not just for jeans.”

The ensuing directions to places would have made it easier, although less interesting, for Sarah Black to help scientists in their search for evidence of past life on Mars. She recently came to the University of Alaska Fairbanks to create Martian rocks, and is now back in Colorado destroying them.

No, it’s not out of frustration.

The doctoral student at the University of Colorado Boulder is conducting an experiment that will help scientists determine if suspected hot spots for potential life on Mars were truly once hot spots.

“We know that hydrothermal systems here on Earth can host these really thriving microbial communities,” Black said. “So a really good place for us to look for potential signs of life on Mars are places where we think hydrothermal systems existed.”

These systems form when water seeps through oceanic or continental crust to where the magma lies underneath. The magma superheats the water, and sometimes highly acidic volcanic gases mix in. Then pressure mounts until the hot, acidic water spews forth from the crust and erodes the surrounding volcanic rock.

Although hydrothermal systems no longer exist on Mars, scientists are searching for the clues left behind from the erosion.

But scientists are basing their search on what they know about volcanic rocks on Earth, not Mars, said Black. Mars rocks have a lot more iron in them, which colors the planet red. They could also leave behind a different pattern of minerals than their Earthly counterparts.

So Black’s experiment will simulate the erosion in a lab but will use synthetic Mars rocks instead of those available on our home planet.

To make the rocks, Black traveled to a lab that had just what she needed: a furnace that heats up to 2,400 F. The Geophysical Institute’s Experimental Petrology Lab at UAF uses the furnace to create volcanic rocks for scientific experiments.

“The lab has a pretty extensive amount of equipment, high-temperature furnaces, and all of these pressurizing pumps, pressure lines and valves,” said UAF geosciences Professor Jessica Larsen, who runs the lab. “There are fewer than 10 labs like this at universities across the nation.”

Black mixed the same chemicals in the same ratios as found in volcanic Mars rocks. She made several batches of synthetic molten lava in the furnace, which she then cooled into rocks. They are now at her university, where she will place them in hot, acidic water to see what minerals are left behind.

If the leftovers resemble what scientists have already been searching for, then it’s a thumbs up that they’re on the right track. If not, then Black’s findings can provide better clues to search for – ones that might ultimately lead to microbial Martians or signs that they existed.

Hydro and extremo — an ET combo?

Inhospitable to humans, hydrothermal systems provide an all-inclusive spa for microbes called extremophiles. They thrive in conditions that would kill most other life forms on Earth.

Life’s early pioneers may have emerged in these systems, which today include hydrothermal vents in the ocean floor and the Grand Prismatic Spring at Yellowstone National Park.

Before Mars cooled, it had magma, water, volcanoes and, most likely, plumes of scorching, acidic water spouting from fissures in the planet’s crust. Meteorites hit the planet’s surface, generating more heat and creating more lava.

It stands to reason that microbial Martians may have once existed in the planet’s hydrothermal systems, if they are not still there today.

While Black doesn’t know if she’ll see extraterrestrial life in her lifetime, she said she’s happy to help with a quest that seems an undeniable part of human nature.

“We are explorers, and it’s our natural inclination to want to understand more about the origin of life,” she said. “And one place where we can look for things to help further our understanding about the origin of life is Mars.”

For updates on Sarah Black’s findings, go to sarahrblack.com.

Sarah Black’s illustrated experiment

Step 1: Mix the exact types of minerals (all in powder form) in the exact ratios as they are found in volcanic Mars rocks. This means adding a lot more red dust – or iron – to the mix.

Step 2: Pour the mixed powder into a crucible, a tiny metal cup, and place in a furnace that can reach more than 2,400 degrees Fahrenheit. This turns the powder into synthetic Mars molten lava.

Step 3: Take the crucible out and “quench” it, which means plunging it in water. This cools the lava and turns it into rock.

Step 4: Place the Mars rocks in scorching hot acidic waters that simulate a hydrothermal system.

Step 5: Analyze the composition of minerals left behind and compare them to the composition of minerals left behind by Earth’s hydrothermal systems.

Step 6: Either confirm that scientists are looking on Mars in the right places for where hydrothermal systems once existed or help steer them in the right direction.

Step 7: Go curling, because your advisor who visited UAF — Brian Hynek — went to the Fairbanks Curling Club, loved it and introduced it to his lab group, which named their curling team The Space Cats.

Heidi Rader describes the new Grow & Tell app and website she developed as “essentially Yelp for gardeners.”

The free app, which was released Tuesday, allows gardeners in the United States to see what vegetable varieties grow best in their areas based on what other gardeners say. The app also invites gardeners to act as citizen scientists and rate the varieties that they have grown for taste, yield and reliability.

Rader teaches gardening and farming as the tribes Extension educator for the University of Alaska Fairbanks Cooperative Extension Service and the Tanana Chiefs Conference. She also reaches gardeners and farmers from around the state through distance-delivered courses.

Vegetable variety trials conducted in Fairbanks show what grows well here, she said but not in other areas of the state.

“That works pretty well for me but not for people, say, in Arctic Village or Nome,” she said.

Rader hopes that lots of gardeners will rate crops, which will make the app more useful for others. “It’s citizen scientists conducting variety trials where they live,” she said.

The app is available on the App Store for iPhones, Google Play for android phones or as a website at www.growandtell.us. Development of the app was funded by a grant from the eXtension Foundation to promote innovation in the Cooperative Extension Service. To keep the app free, Rader said, Extension will seek sponsorships to pay for updates, fixes and regular maintenance. Additionally, event advertising can also be purchased and targeted to app users locally, by state or nationally.

Rader hopes to expand the app to capture ratings on other plants used in the landscape and garden, including trees, shrubs, flowers, fruits and berries.

The University of Alaska Fairbanks recognized Rader with a 2016 Invent Alaska Award for her work on the app. Cornell University contributed ratings that it had already collected as well as lessons learned from operating a similar citizen science project. A Boston-based company, Geisel Software, built the app. For more information, contact Rader at grow.andtell@alaska.edu.

For several days in a row last September, Hannah Foss kept seeing the same ad pop up in her Facebook feed. It was an invitation to design the livery — the decorative paint job on the outside of an airplane — for a new Hainan Airlines Boeing 787-9 Dreamliner. The design was supposed to use characters from DreamWorks’ Kung Fu Panda films, and the prize for the first-place design was an all-expenses-paid trip to China.

“I scrolled past it a few times,” Foss said, “but eventually I had a few free evenings, so I said, ‘Why not?'”

Foss had a major advantage. She’s a graphic designer at the University of Alaska Fairbanks Geophysical Institute, and she knew what she was doing.

The entry process was all online. Hainan’s contest website used a 3D model plane and offered different sets of Kung Fu Panda character images to choose from. It was more of a design project than a drawing project, Foss said, because you had to use their design elements, not draw the airplane and characters from scratch. She ended up submitting three designs, adding to more than 200,000 entries Hainan received from the U.S. and Canada.

She didn’t think she had much of a chance. “I definitely wasn’t expecting any word back. I didn’t want to get my hopes up,” Foss said.

A few weeks later, she got an email from the Hainan marketing staff. “They said ‘Oh, you won the thing!’ I was like, ‘Oh, cool!'”

It isn’t the first time Foss has been recognized for her talents.

Foss and her mother emigrated from Adelaide, South Australia, to Alaska in 2008. In 2013 she completed a bachelor of fine art degree at UAF and a diploma in character animation through Animation Mentor. Foss was named the Greater Fairbanks Chamber of Commerce’s 2016 Artist of the Year.

In addition to being involved with the Downtown Association of Fairbanks’ Window Project, she also took part in the 2013 Fairbanks Film Festival and designed the 2014 Yukon Quest logo. At the Geophysical Institute, Foss has created graphics for the Learning Through Cultural Connections curriculum and the animations for “Kiuguyat: The Northern Lights” video, which accompanies the curriculum.

Foss plans to fly from Seattle to China on the new plane sometime in May or June, once it is decorated with her design. Her travel itinerary isn’t done yet because the aircraft is still being assembled in Charleston, North Carolina, from parts manufactured all around the globe. It will also be painted there, but the Kung Fu Panda decals will be applied in China.

Application of the paint and the decals is tricky because the 787 Dreamliner has a copper exoskeleton that can absorb and dissipate the electric charge if a plane is hit by lightning. The exoskeleton protects the airplane’s electronics. Safety regulations both in the U.S. and China stipulate that the coating materials can’t be more than a certain number of microns thick. Just how thick is proprietary.

“They don’t want the paint plus decals to insulate the plane and render the copper shielding useless,” Foss said.

She expected that as soon as she turned in the designs her involvement would end, but that hasn’t been the case. Steve Myers, a contractor in Seattle working with Boeing, has made sure Foss has been involved.

“He said, ‘You do graphic design, this is your job.’ He wanted to make sure, as revisions were made for safety reasons, that I could be on board and help,'” Foss said. Myers sent her chips of all the aviation-safe paints that would work best in full-spectrum lighting at 30,000 feet so she could pick the colors. She reviewed the Adobe Illustrator files and she interacted with DreamWorks staff to make tweaks to some of the Kung Fu Panda images.

Designing the aircraft livery for Hainan has been a terrific learning and networking opportunity, but Foss is most looking forward to the trip.

“Growing up in Adelaide, which is such a cultural melting pot, and especially being so close to our Asian neighbors, China’s been on a list of places I’ve really wanted to visit,” Foss said. “I have not yet traveled to a place where English is not the first language, so that’s really exciting.”

Stan Boutin has climbed more than 5,000 spruce trees in the last 30 years. He’s fallen only once, and he has often returned to the forest floor knowing if a ball of twigs and moss contained newborn red squirrel pups. Over the years, those squirrels have taught Boutin and his colleagues many things, including their apparent ability to predict the future.

Boutin, of the University of Alberta in Edmonton, was in Fairbanks recently to give a lecture on one of the easiest-to-find animals in the boreal forest. The square-jawed biologist is perhaps the world’s foremost expert on red squirrels.

By marking squirrel pups with ear tags over the years, he and his helpers have gotten to know the entire red squirrel population of a square kilometer of boreal forest between Haines Junction and Kluane Lake in the Yukon.

Here are some insights from three decades of observations of more than 10,000 individuals:

Though one squirrel on his plot lived to be nine years old, few live past four. Most don’t survive their first year.

Squirrels spend their entire lives in a small patch of forest surrounding a midden, a pile of spruce cones with tunnels and chambers throughout.

When squirrels rattle off their call, they are signaling their possession of a small territory centered on a midden.

Mother squirrels sometimes bequeath their territory to a pup and move one or two territories over where there is a vacancy.

Sibling squirrels sometimes share nests on cold nights, then go back to their own territories when temperatures warm.

Squirrels eat a lot of things, including nestling songbirds and snowshoe hare babies, but the largest part of their diet by far is white spruce seeds.

White spruce trees produce great pulses of cones every two to six years. Other years, trees grow no cones. Boutin figures the trees create so many cones suddenly to “swamp” predators like the red squirrel, ensuring that some seeds remain to germinate into trees.

These “mast years” of high cone production should give spruce trees the element of surprise. Squirrels should react with a delay, having many babies the year after many cones pop up. But female squirrels seem to be outsmarting the trees.

“All hell breaks loose in a mast year,” Boutin said. “Reproduction absolutely explodes.”

In a normal year, squirrels have one litter of pups and don’t try again. When spruce cones are abundant, females will have two litters and sometimes breed until the end of summer, even though new cones don’t mature until September.

“These buggers are cranking out reproduction when it’s ahead of masting reproduction,” Boutin said.

How can female squirrels predict a good food supply before it exists? Boutin is not sure. Spruce trees produce buds in May that squirrels eat. Perhaps there is some chemical signal within the buds that triggers what Boutin calls “adaptive anticipation” within the tiny orange lords of the boreal forest.

Since the late 1970s, the University of Alaska Fairbanks’ Geophysical Institute has provided this column free in cooperation with the UAF research community. Ned Rozell is a science writer for the Geophysical Institute.

Meriam Karlsson grew up on a small dairy farm in southern Sweden, where her family raised hay, barley and oats for a herd of 20 to 30 cows.

Agriculture seemed like a logical career path, but Karlsson found plants and crop production more compelling than animals, so she studied horticulture in Sweden and at Michigan State University. While earning her doctorate, she became interested in the effects of temperature and light on plants, particularly flowering plants produced in greenhouses.

The horticulture professor has continued work in this area for nearly 30 years at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. The extreme day lengths and short field seasons in Alaska intrigued her from the start, and they still do.

“It made sense to study lights and temperatures in Alaska,” she said.

Karlsson’s current research centers on greenhouse and controlled-environment crop production, controlled-environment technology and resource management in commercial greenhouses.

Not all light is the same, whether in nature or the greenhouse. Because Alaska greenhouses need a lot of supplemental lighting, she is studying LEDs, which use less energy but provide a different quality of light than traditional sodium lights. Karlsson is looking at how the different combinations of colors in LEDs affect plant growth and is developing guidelines for Alaska greenhouse operators to use.

She has found that LEDs work best for seedlings and plants that grow close to the ground and that different plants at different stages need different types of light.

Much of her work concerns greenhouse food production because of the interest in local foods, Karlsson said. Her office is a few steps down the hall from the research greenhouse on the south side of the Arctic Health Research Building.

One area in the greenhouse holds flats of 6-inch-high orange and red bell peppers that she is growing as part of a trellising experiment. Little research has been done in Alaska with peppers, which are a good potential greenhouse crop, she said.  To optimize greenhouse space and productivity, the plants are trellised, with two lateral branches that grow from the main stem. The horticulturist is looking at how pruning the lateral branches affects production.

The greenhouse on West Ridge also holds red, cream-colored and speckled poinsettias, grown for the benefit of students in her applied plant science class. The flowers demonstrate the effects of different light and temperature treatments. Karlsson teaches a sustainable agriculture course with two other professors and a class in greenhouse management this spring. The greenhouse class is popular among students, some of whom want to operate their own greenhouses.

Eric Cook is among those who have learned from Karlsson. Before coming to work for her in 2014, Cook had studied horticulture and worked in greenhouses in Guam, Oregon and Wyoming and at Chena Hot Springs. But he had not worked in a research greenhouse with state-of-the-art climate and light controls until he worked with Karlsson for a year. Cook said he learned about scientific design and trials, the use of beneficial insects to control pests and more about greenhouse controls and lighting.

“I definitely picked up some skills from her,” said Cook, who is now the greenhouse coordinator at Red Butte Garden and Arboretum in Salt Lake City. He described Karlsson as quiet, kind and well-liked by students.

As part of a project funded by the Division of Agriculture, Karlsson will compare the nutritional value of locally produced vegetables and fruit this summer to that of imported produce in grocery stores. She will look at different varieties of tomatoes, lettuce and spinach, and possibly other vegetables. Some of the locally grown produce will be grown in the university greenhouse and some will be purchased from farmers markets. She will analyze the vegetables’ sugar and mineral content in university labs, and a lab in the Lower 48 may evaluate antioxidant levels.

“We hope that locally grown is more nutritious,” she said. “We want to get some good documentation to show that.”

Karlsson is also trying to develop greenhouse protocols for growing spinach, which is in demand but difficult to grow outside because it bolts and flowers under the long daylight hours. Growing spinach with LEDs seems to delay flowering, but more work needs to be done to see if it can be grown commercially throughout the year in greenhouses, she said.

Karlsson does not take much time away from her greenhouse or her research.

“My plants grow 24-7,” she explained. “It’s an exciting area. Growing is a good field to be in.”

Five high school students from Fairbanks’ West Valley High School took top honors at a regional competition for original scientific research. Students won more than $12,000 in scholarships and cash prizes and will advance to a national competition in San Diego, California, to compete for scholarships up to $12,000.

The winners of the 32nd Alaska Statewide High School Science Symposium, March 25-26, are Piper Brase (first), Thomas DeLong (second), Van Levey (third), Nicholas Alexeev (fourth) and Sydney Cox (fifth).

“I was really surprised when they announced that I won,” said Brase. “I can’t wait to go present in San Diego and share my lamprey research with the Lower 48.”

The University of Alaska Fairbanks College of Natural Science and Mathematics hosts the symposium with co-directors Abel Bult-Ito, a neurobiology professor, and Denise Kind, supervisor of the biology and wildlife laboratory.

The wins qualify the students to compete with more than 200 high school students across the nation at the 55th Junior Science and Humanities Symposia Program, April 26-30. The research arm of the U.S. Department of Defense sponsors the national competition, which aims to interest students in careers related to science, technology, engineering and mathematics.

Twenty-eight students competed in this year’s ASHSSS, which has been compared to an advanced science fair on par with undergraduate research. Students develop a hypothesis and test it under the guidance of a volunteer mentor in the STEM field. They write a research paper on their findings and present results at the symposium to their peers, teachers and volunteer judges.

“The students’ research projects ranged from studies on human behavior, feeding behavior of lamprey, computer modeling of water erosion and design of trusses using genetics algorithms, to leaf selection by aspen leaf miners and nitrogen distribution within Glacier Bay National Park, and many of these projects were at college level,” said Bult-Ito.

West Valley High School science teachers Cyndie Beale and Greg Kahoe have participated in the ASHSSS over the last two decades, integrating the competition into their Advanced Placement science classes.

“It gets students doing real science on topics that interest them,” Beale said. “It’s a lot of work, but it helps students develop skills that they will use throughout their life, like how to research, analyze and present on a subject.”

The Alaska symposium is open to high school students across the state, although all entries this year came from West Valley High School.

Bult-Ito said he hopes more students across Alaska consider participating next year.

“We would love to include more students from across the state,” Bult-Ito said. “Dr. Kind and I are willing to visit students and their teachers to help them develop their projects and identify potential mentors.”

ADDITIONAL CONTACTS: Abel Bult-Ito, ASHSSS co-director and UAF professor of neurobiology and anatomy in the Department of Biology and Wildlife, at 907-978-2169 or abultito@alaska.edu

ON THE WEB:
JSHS: www.jshs.org
ASHSSS: cnsm.uaf.edu/ashsss-2

On a sunny afternoon in Nome, Jeff Oatley stepped off his fat bike. That day, for the first time since before the Super Bowl, he had nowhere to ride tomorrow.

On March 7, Oatley, with his wife Heather Best (who rode a few hundred miles of choice trail with him), finished a winter bicycle ride from Skagway to Nome.

Despite snowstorms that stalled him on the middle Yukon River for a few days, Oatley averaged 50 miles each day for more than a month. That’s like biking on a snowmachine trail from Denver to New York, except with more spruce trees and wolves.

Advances in high-flotation winter bicycles with tires thick as loaves of bread have enabled some impressive feats. On March 26, six fat bikers sped over a hilly 100-mile trail in 10 hours in the White Mountains north of Fairbanks.

But the 47-year-old Fairbanks civil engineer’s recent journey stands alone. Not only did he ride the frigid Yukon Quest trail this winter, Oatley also rode most of this year’s Iditarod trail in the same trip.

How did he overcome the many elements that would stop most of us? Fatigue, extreme cold, pedaling up your driveway in the middle of the trip?

Oatley checks just about all the physiological and psychological boxes such a feat requires. A narrowed version of the 5-foot-9 cyclist recently answered some questions about his ride.

He weighs about 185 pounds now, down from his usual 192. When he stepped on a scale in the village of Kaltag a few weeks ago, he was 20 pounds lighter than when he started.

Some winter adventurers, like Oatley’s late friend and mentor Rocky Reifenstuhl, have trouble eating on the trail. Oatley never does. He carried about three pounds of food for each day, which made his bike weigh 80 pounds at times.

When it was 40 below, he could not satisfy his hunger. He woke a few times to eat the crackers and summer sausage and Nutter Butter cookies tucked inside his sleeping bag.

“You’ve got to be able to eat like a horse, but eat what a goat would,” he said.

Oatley felt the knife edge of minus 50 Fahrenheit a few times. He frostbit his face and fingertips, the latter when he grabbed his titanium pot on the frozen Fortymile River.

“It felt like the pot was red hot,” he said. “I had to throw it.”

Oatley has good gear and knows when to shed and add layers. He rode much of the route with an upper base layer on his torso, covered by a fleece sweater and a riding shell. He rarely wore long underwear under his biking pants.

“I’m a lot more of a heater than other people,” he said. “When I’m riding with someone, usually everyone has one more layer than me.”

Oatley is also a great sleeper. Getting decent rest every night allowed him to recover for the next day’s effort.

“Years ago, the Rock (Reifenstuhl) taught me how to lay the bike on the ground, curl up on it and sleep for 10 minutes. After you do that, the gym floor will feel like a big warm bed.”

Physiologists still don’t know what function sleep has for humans and other animals, but it matters.

“When you get in a few hours more sleep, the degree of difficulty goes way down,” he said. “I was talking to mushers in Dawson who had gotten 45 minutes of sleep in the last few days, and I don’t know how they did it.”

Like mushers and mountain climbers, Oatley seems to have a great tolerance for discomfort. On the day he rode into Dawson City in the Yukon, he managed 98 wilderness miles on his bike. It took 17 hours and he dropped into valleys thick with 45-below air. Rather than camping in his bag and bivouac sack, he kept pedaling.

“You’ve got to be flexible,” he said of altering his plan to camp halfway to Dawson City. Twenty years of similar experiences help.

“I’ve just done a lot of big hard days,” said Oatley, who once pedaled across America on a road bike in 10 days. “It doesn’t seem that abnormal.”

That leads to perhaps the most important asset for someone riding a bike across Alaska during a cold winter: The mind.

Twenty years ago, scientists found that Alaskans participating in a long-distance winter race were intelligent, stubborn, imaginative, tolerant and self-sufficient. That seems to describe Oatley.

He does not panic at a drop in temperature or a coastal wind. And he does not expect a clean run. He said he wouldn’t trade the bad days, like the ones he pushed his bike toward Ruby while wearing borrowed snowshoes.

“Out of 36 days, three were no fun at all,” he said. “But you kind of want some days to be like that.”

He could have bailed on the trip with a commercial flight from a village. He could have rolled the bike into his shed at the halfway point. But the thrill of seeing new country and meeting people outweighed the pains and setbacks.

“You’re out there because it’s fun,” he said. “You don’t really want to stop. It never crossed my mind.

“Some people think it’s like torture or masochism. I don’t think I’d be doing it if it wasn’t fun.”

He realizes his journeys are not everyone’s idea of recreation. Some villagers thought he was crazy for riding such a slow device compared to a snowmachine. But he said the mushers and trappers he met on the trail always understood.

“You’ve got to have a little Forrest Gump in you,” he said.

Alaska Nanooks swimmer Sierra Kinworthy may be temporarily trading in her swim cap for a crown — but she’s going to hold on to the swimsuit. The Wasilla native is preparing for one of her biggest competitions yet, only this time, it’s not in a pool.

With the same drive, focus and work ethic she uses when approaching a collegiate swim meet, Kinworthy hopes to capture the title of Miss Alaska 2017 in Anchorage on June 8. If Kinworthy succeeds, she will qualify and advance to the 97th Miss America Competition in Atlantic City, New Jersey, on Sept. 10.

“I’ve really wanted to compete within the Miss America Organization since I was a little girl,” Kinworthy said. “Growing up, I adored watching the pageant and dreaming of being a role model to young girls like myself. I knew in high school that I wanted to compete in the Miss Alaska pageant eventually and this is a perfect time in my life to do so.”

In her first year at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, the sophomore transfer from Arkansas’ Ouachita Baptist University made an immediate impact on the Nanooks’ roster this season, kicking off the 2016-17 campaign with a top-20 finish at the inaugural Collegiate Open Water Championships in September.

Kinworthy appeared in nine meets for the Nanooks this season, breaking the top-five overall on 22 different occasions. Kinworthy also set career-best times in four different events this year, including the 400 IM (4:54.99), the 500-yard freestyle (5:10.33), the 1,000-yard freestyle (10:26.69) and the 1,650-yard freestyle (17:34.04).

Kinworthy said working with Head Coach Scott Lemley and Assistant Coach Kinsey Laine helped improve her times throughout the season.

“I’ve always been blessed with great coaches, but Kinsey and Scott bring an intensity and focus that I’ve never seen before,” she said. “They are both so energetic and supportive, it’s impossible to not want to give them your best effort.”

With the Nanooks’ 2016-17 season coming to a conclusion at the end of February, Kinworthy could choose to use the time away from the pool and focus on academics. She’s already a star student-athlete, as exemplified by her being named to the Fall 2016 Dean’s List.

Instead, that time has been spent training for the upcoming Miss Alaska pageant, which includes working with a nutritionist and trainer, an interview coach and a choreographer to help with a Charleston-inspired jazz dance, which will serve as her talent in June.

“Pageant prep is a complete constant. Every day I work on updating my knowledge of current events, maintaining a healthy lifestyle for the swimsuit competition and trying to prep myself for questions I may be asked during the interview portion,” Kinworthy said of the demands of pageant prep. “The most time-consuming area is my talent portion, just because I really want to perform my best on stage. I love dancing and I want to be able to show my personality through my choreography.”

Despite balancing school, off-season swimming training, pageant prep and volunteering with the Alaska Special Olympics on Saturdays, Kinworthy takes it all in stride and continues to use it as a learning tool for the future.

“I think learning to balance this all will be something valuable I can carry with me after this experience is over,” she said. “Honestly, I feel like I’m constantly running from class to practice to dance rehearsal, but I wouldn’t want it any other way. I think my experience as an athlete has actually helped because I am very goal-oriented and collegiate athletes are really great at learning how to prioritize and organize their time.”

Kinworthy credits her family as being her biggest support system during the journey to become the next Miss Alaska.

“My family has been so great throughout this entire process. My mom and dad have constantly reminded me that the only thing I can control is how I prep and carry myself in my training and on stage,” Kinworthy said. “My friends, teammates and the community at UAF have been so great, as well. I have a great support system, which makes this this all the more fun and rewarding.”

The University of Alaska Museum of the North has received a $360,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to support the renovation of the historic Gallery of Alaska. The funding will allow the museum to hire an anthropologist, who will visit Native communities to solicit their input into the gallery project, as well as consult with a team of humanities scholars.

The gallery was built in in 1980 and is the only public portion of the museum that was not updated during an expansion completed in 2005. The museum launched the Gallery of Alaska project in 2014. The curators and staff worked to identify interpretive themes and catalog the objects currently on display. Most recently, the team finished an interpretive plan for the new gallery and is currently working on the layout and design of more than 70 exhibits.

The uniting theme for the new gallery is the bond between the landscape and the changing nature of life in Alaska and the North.  Alaska’s land and life are profoundly connected, said museum director Aldona Jonaitis.  “The land has meaning — both philosophical and practical — for all Alaskans. In turn, Alaska’s life shapes this land. This theme has universal relevance, as everyone interacts with their own environment.”

A lead gift of $1 million by longtime museum supporters Joseph E. Usibelli and Peggy Shumaker was previously announced. Another $500,000 has been raised from individuals.

ADDITIONAL CONTACTS: Morgan Dulian, UAMN director of development, at 907-474-5484 or via email at madulian@alaska.edu.

ON THE WEB:  www.uaf.edu/museum/membership-giving/goa-renovation/

The University of Alaska Museum of the North is exploring birds at hands-on programs during the month of April. At Family Day: Birds on Saturday, April 22, from noon to 4 p.m., visitors can discover the diverse world of Alaska birds.

There is no admission fee for children 14 and under at Family Day events, thanks to support from TOTE Maritime.

Families are invited to drop in with children five and under at Early Explorers each Friday from 10 a.m.-noon. Teen Studio on Saturday, April 29, offers an opportunity for young adults ages 13-18 to explore birds and art.

For more information about the museum’s programs and events, visit the website at www.uaf.edu/museum or call 474-7505.

A University of Alaska Fairbanks study has determined that warmer water migrating from the Atlantic Ocean is a surprisingly powerful contributor to Arctic sea ice decline.

Research led by Igor Polyakov, a professor at UAF’s International Arctic Research Center and College of Natural Science and Mathematics, has found that Atlantic currents contribute to sea ice loss in the Arctic Ocean at a rate comparable to warming air temperatures.

“This is a very important step toward a seasonal ice-free Arctic,” said Polyakov.

The findings, outlined in the journal Science’s April 6 edition, provide a greater understanding of the complex dynamics that contribute to sea ice melt. Co-authors of the paper include UAF’s Andrey Pnyushkov, Robert Rember, Till Baumann and Vladimir Ivanov, as well as collaborators from Russia, Canada, Poland, Germany, Norway and the United States.

The Arctic Ocean has experienced dramatic reductions in sea ice in the past decade. The Eastern Eurasian Basin has had almost no ice by the end of each summer since 2011. Circulating Atlantic waters have been considered a small factor in that decline, due to a phenomenon known as stratification.

In the Arctic, warmer and denser water from the Atlantic has normally remained beneath a colder and lighter surface layer. The greater the difference in density between the layers, the less likely they are to mix. Without mixing, the heat from the warmer water can’t come into contact with sea ice at the surface.

That has changed. Data collected by Polyakov and other researchers during the Nansen and Amundsen Basins Observational System project showed increased mixing in the Eastern Eurasian Basin, a major pathway for Atlantic water into the Arctic Ocean. That means more heat is being transferred to the Arctic sea ice on the surface.

Even before analyzing the data, the research team noticed that something was changing. They depend on solid sea ice to deploy their research buoys. During the 2015 expedition aboard the icebreaking research vessel Akademik Tryoshnikov, much of the sea ice was too rotten to support the buoys, Polyakov said. “For the first time, we had a problem finding a suitable ice floe to deploy buoys. We spent several days trying to find such a floe.”

NABOS sends comprehensive research cruises through the Arctic Ocean every two years. The NABOS project is currently planning its 2017 research cruise.

ADDITIONAL CONTACTS: Igor Polyakov, ivpolyakov@alaska.edu, 907-474-2686; Eddy Carmack, with Fisheries and Oceans Canada’s Institute of Ocean Sciences, eddy.carmack@gmail.com; Jeff Richardson, UAF University Relations, 907-474-6284, jarichardson6@alaska.edu

The University of Alaska Fairbanks School of Management will honor Steve Lundgren as its 41st business leader of the year during a sold-out dinner and award ceremony April 15 at the Westmark Fairbanks Hotel Gold Room.

Lundgren is president and CEO of Denali State Bank. Lundgren’s career in the financial services industry is a true success story spanning over three decades, during which he has served the Fairbanks business community as a leader, mentor and influencer.

“I believe the role of business leaders is to use our positions to support the next generation of leaders for the business community,” Lundgren said. “I hope my leadership continues to have an impact on the community and the next generation of young leaders in Fairbanks.”

Lundgren began his career in Oregon as a management trainee at a small savings and loan after graduating from Oregon State University. After working locally for Alaska USA Federal Credit Union, Lundgren accepted a position at Key Bank working with Mike Milam, who would become a lifelong friend. After nearly 15 years at Key Bank, Lundgren was offered a position at Mt. McKinley Bank, where he worked for six years before moving to Denali State Bank.

Lundgren has been a progressive leader in the local banking industry and is also well recognized nationally. He’s the Alaska representative on the American Bankers Association Community Bankers Council, and he’s past president of the Alaska Bankers Association, representing all seven banks that operate within the state of Alaska.

Lundgren serves on the board of directors, is a past board chair and currently chairs the Finance Committee of the Greater Fairbanks Chamber of Commerce. He’s a member and past president of the Fairbanks Sunrisers Rotary Club and a former board chair of the Fairbanks Economic Development Corp.

Lundgren also has a long history of supporting the military. He’s a member of the Alaskan Command Civilian Advisory Board, and he currently serves as national treasurer of the Air Force Association, headquartered in Washington, D.C. Lundgren is also the Alaska vice chair and Northern Alaska region chair for the Alaska Committee for Employer Support of the Guard and Reserve.

Lundgren served for many years on the Fairbanks chamber’s Military Affairs Committee, and the fruits of his efforts are apparent in the announcements regarding military expansion. He was active in promoting Eielson Air Force Base during the threats of closure or realignment, as well as promoting the assignment of F-35s to Eielson. Lundgren understands the economic impacts on the community and the needs for housing, financing and community services that adding several thousand new residents will entail. In 2000, Lundgren received the prestigious Jim Messer Award, given by the Fairbanks chamber at the Military Appreciation Banquet to an individual who best promoted military-community relations over the years.

Lundgren is a remarkable advocate for education. He serves on the UAF Advocacy Committee and, in this capacity, has provided testimony to the UA Board of Regents and other legislative bodies in support of the university’s mission. Lundgren provides support and mentorship for university students and local young professionals. Lundgren is proud that 16 of his 80 employees at Denali State Bank have degrees from UAF, many from the School of Management, and others are currently attending school at UAF.

ADDITIONAL CONTACTS: Tammy Tragis-McCook, 907-474-7042.

ON THE WEB: http://www.uaf.edu/som

Nine years after it erupted, Kasatochi Island is just beginning to resemble its neighbors.

Kasatochi is a speck in the middle of the Aleutian chain between Dutch Harbor and Adak, about 75 miles east of the latter. The volcanic island had no modern history of erupting until August 2008. In a few days that summer, the island changed from the lush green home of a quarter million seabirds to a gray pile of ash.

Two biologists escaped the island aboard a fishing boat less than one hour before the eruption. The cabin in which they were living disappeared, vaporizing in a hurricane of hot gases and ash.

Following the eruption, Kasatochi seemed dead. Scientists visiting the island one year later searched for one hour before finding the first sprigs of vegetation. A few insects survived the eruption deep within rock folds, but Kasatochi was a quiet place that stunk of sulfur.

The island was muddy and inhospitable, but scientists saw something there: A great opportunity to monitor the return of life to a place that reset itself in a most violent fashion. Studiers of insects, plants, soils and other features have tried to return each summer to document changes.

Jeff Williams, assistant refuge manager for the Alaska Maritime National Wildlife Refuge based in Homer, is a biologist who visited Kasatochi many times before it erupted and had his boots in the mud shortly after. He said the island’s resurrection is progressing to the point where certain seabirds are perhaps as abundant as they were before the eruption.

The biologists who narrowly escaped Kasatochi — Ray Buchheit and Chris Ford — were there to study auklets as refuge scientists had for years. Auklets are hand-size seabirds that are so numerous on some Aleutian islands they fill the air like pepper flakes swirling on a breeze.

Before the eruption, Kasatochi’s rock crevices were home to about 250,000 crested and least auklets.

During the August 2008 eruption, 20 percent of eggs and chicks in the rocks were “entombed,” Williams said. Most of the adults, with the reluctant ability to fly from the shaking, crumbling island, survived.

Hot ash blanketed all the cracks where the birds lay eggs. When Williams returned to the gritty island one year after the eruption, he saw auklet foot scratches on the gray surface and a few eggs that had rolled into the water. He estimated nesting success the eruption summer as zero.

But days, weeks and years passed. Aleutian storms gradually washed grit into the ocean, revealing the rocky structure beneath. Columns of basalt tumbled. The cracks reappeared. And, nine years after their habitat was destroyed, so have the auklets.

“Each year it’s almost like an order of magnitude greater,” Williams said of the auklets’ nesting success. “Year one there were none. Year two there were tens of birds, followed by hundreds of birds in 2010 and low thousands of birds in 2011. The year after that there were tens of thousands.”

As the island eroded from smooth to bumpy, the auklets, which spend most of their year in the Bering Sea, were ready.

“The birds were super attuned to really take advantage of that,” Williams said. “Lots of birds knew Kasatochi was a good place. It’s close to Atka Pass where they forage.”

Other birds, like land-dwelling Lapland longspurs, have not returned to the island. And Kasatochi still looks barren compared with any other Aleutian Island except the erupting Bogoslof.

The return of the auklets is one of the first stages of Kasatochi resembling a mature island covered with knee-high grasses.

“The auklet colony kept growing, and you could see it greening up, the algae starting up on the rocks from the birds’ feces,” Williams said. “They are giving it a nitrogen injection.”

Since the late 1970s, the University of Alaska Fairbanks’ Geophysical Institute has provided this column free in cooperation with the UAF research community. Ned Rozell is a science writer for the Geophysical Institute.

It’s a bummer of a trip when you travel thousands of miles to meet Vikings and find neither them nor any of their good beer to wash down the disappointment.

Such was the case for an enterprising Lutheran who arrived in Greenland in 1721 to convert a few thousand Vikings to his faith.

All Hans Egede found were ruins — the same ruins that Viking archaeologist Thomas McGovern would later excavate. McGovern said the Vikings’ fate is scarier than anyone ever imagined.

“You can do everything right and still go extinct,” he said.

The University of Alaska Fairbanks Alaska Quaternary Center brought McGovern to Fairbanks to give a free talk on why he thinks the Greenland Vikings, or Norse, went extinct.

McGovern, a professor at the City University of New York’s Hunter College, has excavated Viking sites in Greenland for the past 40 years. He said the story he now tells differs vastly from the one he once believed.

Recent studies of excavation sites, historical pollen and soils, and even plaque buildup on the Vikings’ teeth weave a tale about a people whose adaptation to a cooling climate may have ultimately led to their demise.

“It’s one of those things where one adaptation which works for a while may actually make you more vulnerable to the changes happening,” he said.

But to understand the new story, he said, you must first understand the old one.

Both versions of the saga are set against a backdrop of climate change. The Vikings settled Greenland around A.D. 1000 with their livestock during a several-hundred-year anomaly of warm weather known as the Medieval Warm Period. Then the climate started cooling again in the 13th century, which would have made it challenging to grow small crops and keep livestock alive through the winter.

How the Vikings responded to this change is where the stories differ.

“The old story is that these guys are just too dumb to adapt,” he said. This version says the Vikings overharvested the land, and a cooling climate finished them off.

Lacking many historical documents from Greenland Vikings, archaeologists had looked to Iceland Vikings to see how their Greenland counterparts may have behaved. Vikings in Iceland overharvested certain areas, and the resulting erosion created moonlike landscapes. The Apollo astronauts used these areas as training grounds for walking on the moon.

But new studies in Greenland paint a much different picture. Soil samples show that the old Viking farms still had layers of peat. There were no signs of erosion.

Plaque buildup on Greenland Viking teeth through the centuries revealed that they transitioned from a dairy and farm diet to a marine mammal diet. There was also an increase of marine mammal bones in middens as the climate cooled.

This evidence indicates that the Vikings were adapting using the tool they knew best — their longships, said McGovern. They took to the sea to hunt seals. They were already accomplished walrus hunters as they hunted the animals for their ivory — a prized trade good.

But while hunting on the seas may have initially helped them, it could have hurt them because the cooling climate generated dangerous storms.

“All marine hunter-gatherers, including folks in Alaska, suffer terrible loss of life at sea,” said McGovern.

If the best hunters from a several-thousand-strong Viking colony lost their lives at sea over time, then the community left behind might dwindle to nothing.

Sadly, the last thing ever heard from the Greenland Vikings was a letter celebrating a life about to begin — a wedding in 1408. Physical evidence indicates that the Vikings disappeared later that century. That’s when the forests started to grow back in some of the settled areas, according to soil records.

But could the Vikings have possibly packed up their belongings and left in their longships for a new life?

McGovern doesn’t think so, at least not on a large scale. He said nobody may notice 1,000 Vikings leaving, but they sure would notice them showing up. Their exodus would have meant the abandonment of the westernmost bastion of Catholicism. At the time, its reach was shrinking and the subject of almost every fiery sermon across Europe.

“If people then had been given another example of Christian abandonment from Greenland, my heavens, that would have been stuff that they would have used in sermons,” he said.

But it was never mentioned. Popes kept appointing ambassadors to Greenland for 200 years after the Vikings disappeared, even though these ambassadors never left Italy.

It was Lutheran missionary Hans Egede who finally travelled by sea to set foot on Greenland in the 18th century to find the Vikings. But no oil lamps lit dark chambers. No longships, so iconic of the Vikings, entered or departed the fjords. It was just ruins … and no beer.

People who study animal behavior think they may have found out why wolves hunt in packs — because ravens are such good scavengers.

Scientists who watched wolves on Isle Royale in Lake Superior came up with the raven-wolf pack theory after puzzling over a question: Why do wolves hunt in large groups when a single wolf can take down a moose?

To find a possible answer, John Vucetich and Rolf Peterson of Michigan Tech and Thomas Waite of Ohio State University examined 27 years of wolf observations on Isle Royale in northern Michigan. Isle Royale, 45 miles long and up to nine miles wide, sits in the northwest lobe of Lake Superior. A national park, the island supports a population of a few dozen wolves and hundreds of moose. Peterson studied the wolves for more than 30 years, and the researchers used observations from Peterson and his co-workers in the present study.

Peterson’s team witnessed a single wolf killing a moose 11 times, which weakened the notion that wolves hunt in packs because of the difficulty of killing a moose without help. Vucetich, Peterson and Waite used the years of data from the Isle Royale wolf study to calculate that — in terms of energy burned and meat gained — wolves would do best hunting in pairs.

A 1,000-pound moose is much more than two wolves can eat right away, and that’s where the ravens come in. In a study published in Animal Behaviour, the scientists detailed these facts about ravens found by other scientists: Individual ravens can eat and carry away up to 4 pounds of food per day from a large carcass. Ravens were responsible for moving half of a 660-pound moose carcass from a kill site in the Yukon, Canada.

During the 27 years of Peterson’s wolf observations used in the recent study, ravens were present at every wolf kill, often within 60 seconds of a moose’s death. Noted raven researcher Bernd Heinrich has suggested that ravens evolved with wolves, with ravens possibly leading wolves to moose or caribou, and then later feeding upon the carcasses torn open by wolves.

That the wolf pack exists because of ravens is a new idea, supported by the group’s “conservative assumption” that wolves lose up to 44 pounds of food per day to ravens while feeding upon a carcass, and that a pair of wolves loses about 37 percent of a moose carcass to ravens while a pack of six wolves loses just 17 percent.

Ravens sneak in to eat or carry away scraps of moose flesh and organs while wolves are feeding or resting away from the carcass, and the more ravens there are (researchers have counted up to 100 near kill sites), the harder it is for wolves to chase them off.

The urge not to die by starvation may drive wolves to kill “approximately twice as many large prey as would be needed in the absence of ravens,” the scientists wrote. They also wrote that 85 to 90 percent of carnivore species hunt alone, and the wolf pack might not exist if not for the pesky, bold raven.

A version of this column first appeared in 2004. Since the late 1970s, the University of Alaska Fairbanks’ Geophysical Institute has provided this column free in cooperation with the UAF research community. Ned Rozell is a science writer for the Geophysical Institute.

As an Alaska Native artist who grew up in Southeast Alaska, the idea that the land of her ancestors could be bought and sold out from beneath them still baffles Mary Goddard.

“I find it hard to accept that people could purchase land without regard to who it really belonged to and use the natural resources without proper precautions and respect,” she said.

So she did something about it. She created a work of art to express her feelings. “Selling Alaska” is now on display at the Sitka National Historical Park as part of the exhibit Voices of Change: Perspectives on the Transfer of Alaska from Russia to the United States. The artworks on display all depict artistic interpretations of the responses of Alaska Native peoples to the transfer of Alaska in 1867.

The sesquicentennial exhibit was created through a partnership between the Sitka NHP and the University of Alaska Museum of the North. Project manager Karinna Gomez said eight artists responded to the call to reflect on the Alaska Purchase, also called the Treaty of Cession, and the subsequent 150 years of American governance of Alaska Natives.

The treaty explicitly excluded Alaska Natives from the rights and freedoms offered to white inhabitants. Gomez said the artwork conveys a sense of the broad effects this marginalization had on Alaska Natives.

“I was impressed with the historical research, creative insight and emotional response each of the artists put into their projects. They responded with thoughtful projects that together create an exhibit that illustrates the impacts of the transfer,” she said.

Goddard said she wanted her artwork to feel both contemporary and relevant. “Looking back, I can imagine how the Tlingit people must have felt when their land was sold,” she said. “I wanted to tell the story in a way that my ancestors would. I wanted to capture people’s attention but pull them in to really look at the art and discover its message.”

Kelsey Lutz, the Sitka National Historical Park curator, said the exhibit expresses the personal experience of those who were affected by the change and plays an important role in humanizing an otherwise political event.

“At its core, this exhibit carries a message about the cultural diversity that exists in Alaska,” Lutz said. “The exhibit is intended to provide a wide breadth of perspectives about the transfer of Alaska to the U.S. It is important to remember that we are commemorating the anniversary of the sale rather than celebrating it. Not everything that came out of the transfer was positive.”

While many of the pieces in the exhibit capture a feeling of loss, she said, they also demonstrate the vibrancy of Native culture today.

“The exhibit highlights the fact that the treaty impacted all Alaskans, not just the Russian and American delegates,” Lutz said. “Much of the artwork was created by Native artists whose families and cultures have lived through those impacts over the last 150 years.”

The artwork includes paintings, sculptures, digital art, beadwork and metalwork. A Boston-area artist also installed a project on the park’s Totem Loop Trail that explores the legal and legislative response to the treaty.

University of Alaska Fairbanks graduate Erin Gingrich created a work titled “Fragile Wealth” that features five carved salmon hung headless in a row. She said the artwork focuses on the beauty of the state’s natural resources, the meaning that comes with harvesting the fish from her own environment and the understanding that these resources are a gift.

“The exhibit recognizes that Alaska Natives have survived and acknowledges us as a living people,” she said. “My inclusion is important to me because raising awareness about our historical way of life and its evolution to today’s subsistence rights is a key part of my work.”

“Remembering Chief Thomas’ Children, 1923, Nenana,” an oil painting in the exhibit by artist Karen Austen, is notable in that it relied on a black and white historic photograph. She was inspired by meeting the chief’s granddaughters and learning the story behind the picture, which was taken at a potlatch for his children who died from whooping cough.

Austen said she researched the painting using objects preserved in the collections at the UA Museum of the North. “I used samples of chiefs moose hide jackets and beadwork from that time to get the details and colors right. What luck that the gorgeous dress Martha is wearing is actually on display at the museum.”

The Voices of Change exhibit is installed in the park visitor center in Sitka, which was designed to resemble a Tlingit clan house. The space is filled with sacred totem poles and house posts held in trust by the park for local Tlingit clans. The exhibit planners decided to integrate the artwork among these historic objects.

Sitka NHP is the only national park in Alaska commemorating the sesquicentennial this year, in part because it is the only national park tasked with interpreting the Russian America period. Established in 1890, Sitka NHP is Alaska’s smallest national park but also its oldest. The park preserves the site where the Tlingit people were finally defeated by the Russians in 1804 after defending their wooden fort for a week.

Voices of Change will be on display at Sitka NHP through most of the sesquicentennial year. Lutz said it will be available to the public until the end of November.

“We hope the exhibit will generate dialogue about the hardships of the past as well as the healing that needs to happen for the future,” she said.

ADDITIONAL CONTACTS: Karinna Gomez, project manager, 907-474-1828 or krgomez@alaska.edu; Kelsey Lutz, Sitka National Historical Park curator, 907-747-0141 or kelsey_lutz@nps.gov

 ON THE WEB: bit.ly/ak150voicesofchange