The discovery of a prehistoric footprint at an Interior Alaska archaeological site is helping researchers create a more detailed picture of ancient Athabascan family life.

Researchers discovered the footprint, which likely belonged to a pre-teen child, in 2017 near a dwelling unearthed at the Swan Point archaeological site, located in the Shaw Creek Flats near Big Delta. Made more than 1,800 years ago, it’s the oldest known human footprint ever found in the North American sub-Arctic.

The print is among a range of intriguing finds at the site, which archaeologists have explored since archaeologist Charles Holmes discovered the site in 1991. Those include the remnants of dwellings, cache pits and a variety of stone artifacts.

Discovering a footprint at the site still provided a unique thrill, said Gerad Smith, a UAF doctoral candidate.

“As an archaeologist you’re always finding neat things, but when I tell people about this footprint it seems to strike a different emotional nerve,” said Smith, who wrote about the discovery in the March issue of the Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports.

Although it represents just a single footprint, the discovery also may help reveal some details about the lives of area inhabitants nearly two millennia ago. Steve Schoenhair, a University of Alaska Anchorage student, found the footprint while excavating a layer that served as the “living floor” of the site, just outside an oval-shaped house pit.

Someone wearing a soft-soled shoe like a moccasin made the print, which is equivalent to a modern shoe size 5 ½. Carbon dating of the surrounding area determined it was formed between 1,800 and 1,900 years ago.

Smith said researchers were initially skeptical that they could determine if it was an actual footprint, but its identity became clearer after they scanned a plaster mold of the print at UAA. A heel, arch and balls of the foot emerged in the digital image, forming the familiar outline of a human foot.

The depth of those features allowed researchers to estimate the weight of the person who made the footprint. That weight, along with the size of the print, indicated that an 8- to 11-year-old child with healthy body mass likely created the footprint.

The presence of an apparently healthy child at the site, along with the construction of the nearby dwelling, allows researchers to make some broad conclusions, Smith said. The excavated sod house was similar to the 19th century type that would belong to a “big man” in the village. The presence of a child at the site suggests the presence of a family that was relatively well-off while they lived there, according to the paper.

“When I see something like this, I see this probably belonged to someone from an important family,” Smith said.

Researchers recovered and preserved the footprint, and both it and a cast will eventually become part of the collection at the University of Alaska Museum of the North. Work at the Swan Point site continues this summer, with efforts focusing on another house pit excavation about 5 miles away in the same valley.

Other contributors to the study include University of Alaska Anchorage graduate student Ted Parsons, UAA anthropology associate professor Ryan Harrod, Holmes, UAF associate professor of anthropology Joshua Reuther, and UAF anthropology professor Ben Potter.

Every spring, millions of ducks touch down on Yukon Flats National Wildlife Refuge, a spread of muskeg and dark water the size of Maryland. These days, more ruddy ducks seem to be among them. Recent sightings of this handsome, rust-colored bird — the males with a teal-blue beak — suggest ruddy ducks are moving farther northward.

Since the 1960s, biologists for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service have flown into the heart of the broad wetland in middle Alaska to count the ducks that have flown north to nest. Songbirds and ducks to which biologists have attached leg bands have shown up in 45 other states and 12 other countries over the years.

Researchers first saw a ruddy duck nest in Yukon Flats in summer 2013. That was a big deal to biologists — the ducklings proved that at least one pair of ruddy ducks was producing new ducks in Yukon Flats. Typical range maps show the northern limit of ruddy ducks’ breeding range to be near Tetlin Lake in eastern Alaska, a few hundred miles south of Yukon Flats.

It may be time to redraw those range maps. Last summer, Yukon Flats volunteer Michelle Lake spotted another ruddy duck female with three ducklings paddling in its wake. People have now seen at least four ruddy duck families in Yukon Flats in summer. In fall and winter, ruddy ducks live as far away as Central America and the Dominican Republic.

“It seems like this species has moved some of their breeding distribution northward,” said Yukon Flats biologist Bryce Lake, husband of Michelle Lake, a teacher at Effie Kokrine Charter School who volunteers with Yukon Flats in summer.

Yukon River ice at the village of Fort Yukon has trended toward earlier spring disappearance in recent decades. Ponds and lakes in Yukon Flats have followed the same pattern, perhaps creating an opportunity for water birds like ruddy ducks.

“The ice-free period is longer,” Bryce Lake said. “Habitat might be opening earlier now than it was 100 years ago.”

UAF biologist Mark Lindberg and post-doctoral researcher Mark Miller found a trend toward farther-northern spring movement when they looked at duck surveys in North America from 1958 to 2012.

“Most every duck species we studied was shifting north,” Lindberg said.

In late July 2019, Bryce and Michelle Lake will again fly into the buggy, birdy center of Yukon Flats. Sleeping in a tent on some high-ground islands, they will explore the flats with an inflatable boat for 10 days.

“It would not surprise us at all if we picked up another (ruddy duck) brood at one of our spots,” he said.

The Lakes do not expect to see many ruddy ducks. Though Yukon Flats is a vast, intact ecosystem for visiting birds, it is also a protected place for animals that eat them and their eggs.

“Nest survival on Yukon Flats is really low,” Lake said. “Wolves, bears, mink, foxes and gulls are all out there, searching for nests.”

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.

The University of Alaska Fairbanks will continue testing at its new combined heat and power plant through June. During testing, members of the public may observe short-duration releases of steam, accompanied by increased noise near the plant. These steam releases will be similar to those that happen during normal plant operations. For news about the plant, visit http://bit.ly/uaf-chp.

Not long ago, a glaciologist wrote that the number of glaciers in Alaska “is estimated at (greater than) 100,000.” That fuzzy number, maybe written in passive voice for a reason, might be correct. But it depends upon how you count.

Another glaciologist saw an example of the confusion when he visited Yakutat Glacier. Yakutat, near the Alaska town of the same name, is a withering glacier that calves into a deep lake of its own making. As it dies, Yakutat Glacier will increase the number of glaciers in Alaska. And it won’t be long, said Martin Truffer of the Geophysical Institute at the University of Alaska Fairbanks.

Truffer spent time at the glacier and noted it was melting so fast, it would soon become at least three smaller glaciers.

“You get into that paradoxical situation where a glacier is retreating and you get more glaciers,” Truffer said.

His colleague Regine Hock pointed out a similar situation when pondering a request from a magazine reporter on the number of Alaska glaciers.

“Because of climate warming, the number of glaciers in Germany has increased over the last decades by several hundred percent,” she wrote in an email. “There were less than a handful of glaciers in the 1990s; now there are more because these two have fallen apart into mini glaciers.”

A problem in counting Alaska’s glaciers arises in the variety of ways people have named them over the years.

“In Bagley Icefield, it’s really crazy,” Truffer said, referring to a mass of ice where the Southeast panhandle meets the rest of Alaska. “There’s all these different names. Where you separate them, that’s a subjective choice.”

“(Mapmakers) tend to give different names to several branches of an ice mass, all of which, by our more scientific definition, form part of a single glacier,” said Anthony Arendt of the University of Washington, who earned his Ph.D. at the Geophysical Institute. “There are many cases where two glaciers flow from different accumulation areas and merge into a single ice mass at the terminus. The Agassiz and Malaspina glaciers are good examples of this.”

“What most people usually see is the very lowest part of a glacier, the glacier tongue coming down a valley,” Hock said. “So, this is one glacier. You drive around the next corner and see another glacier flowing down another valley. So you would think this is two glaciers. However, if you flew over the ice mass you would see that both glaciers are actually connected in a large ice field.

“The basic problem is that ice often is connected high up but then flows into individual valleys,” Hock said. “That’s one reason why the number of glaciers is a pretty meaningless number and impossible to determine accurately; what counts is the total area.”

In a piece he wrote for the journal Science, Arendt estimated the total area of Alaska’s glaciers at about 34,000 square miles of ice. To put that figure in perspective, that much blue ice would cover the entire state of Maine.

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. A version of this column ran in 2011.

At age three, Liz Millman knew she wanted to become a veterinarian. She fell in love with sled dogs at the age of seven, got her first dog sled at the age of 10, and owned her first husky by the time she was 13.

Now, not only is she a veterinarian, she also supervises a crew of about 40 people as the race return program director for the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race. Millman is part of the first class of graduates from the collaborative veterinary program offered by the University of Alaska Fairbanks and Colorado State University.

“I didn’t get into vet school right away. Instead, I got a job in Alaska, working for DeeDee Jonrowe, who is a famous Iditarod musher,” she said. “I spent two years learning how to run sled dogs, how to race them, how to care for them, and living my dream. And then I found out that the University of Alaska Fairbanks was starting a vet school with Colorado State. I applied and, in 2015, began my first year of veterinary school.”

The collaborative veterinary training program allows 10 students to enroll each year, giving preference to Alaska residents. Students attend veterinary medicine courses at UAF for the first two years and at CSU for the last two years.

The program was established between the two land-grant universities to give students in Alaska access to a top-ranked veterinary medicine education partially in their home state, where veterinarians are in high demand. Additionally, the partnership gives CSU veterinary students an opportunity to learn about Alaska fish and wildlife, marine animal science, sports medicine and rehabilitation of sled dogs, and a variety of global public health challenges that involve environmental, human and veterinary medicine.

The program is a way for Alaska to grow its own veterinarians and for local clinics to make an investment in the future workforce. Dr. Barb Cole, a veterinarian and owner of the Fairbanks-based Aurora Animal Clinic, is one of the program’s mentors.

Cole has been a guest lecturer for the veterinary medicine program and regularly hires students at the clinic. She and her family have also endowed a scholarship for first-and second-year vet students.

“I had such a positive experience, that we typically always have at least one student that we have hired throughout the school year for weekend work, with the option of working in the summer as well,” she said. “It’s a nice liaison with the university.”

Such partnerships play a vital role in expanding quality education opportunities.

“The local practitioners are great about providing opportunities for the students,” said Dr. Karsten Hueffer, one of the UAF faculty members. “The students work in the local clinics, gaining experience as well as establishing professional relationships with potential future employers.”

Jeff Varvil, associate manager of regional operations for the State of Alaska National Veterinary Associates, said partnering with UAF is especially rewarding because the support goes beyond helping students with schooling.

“We are interested in helping them find a career path and support them in finding a job,” he said. “We view them as more than just potential employees. We want them to join our professional family, and what better way to do it than to let them grow with us beyond their graduation.”

Having homegrown veterinarians also will be a boon to Alaska, where the long, dark winters and cold climate take some would-be residents by surprise.

“Hiring from the Outside is a challenge, because people might not know what they are getting into, with living in Alaska,” said Hueffer. “There is a lot of turnover.”

The new crop of Alaska-grown veterinarians may be the ideal solution for meeting this demand. Not only are they recipients of an education from one of the top-ranked programs in the country, most of them prefer to live in Alaska and serve the state in a variety of ways. Jed Harding, a former commercial fisherman and a new graduate of the program, would like to develop a mobile boat-based practice to serve villages.

Millman said unique opportunities like those are part of the attraction of practicing in the Last Frontier.

“After a month I knew Alaska was going to be home,” said Millman. “It’s pretty incredible to be graduating vet school and going back to Alaska to continue caring for these dogs and building a career.”

RUSSELL FJORD — Standing on this smooth gravel shoreline, 15 miles northeast of the town of Yakutat, you can tell something big happened. A forest of dead trees encircles the shoreline. The dry, bone-white stems poke from mint-green alders and willows, 100 steps from the water.

Alive since the days Natives first noticed wooden ships in Yakutat Bay, the Sitka spruce died a few decades ago, when an unseen glacier drowned them.

Hubbard Glacier is the name; 1986 was the year. That’s when the ever-advancing, 76-mile long mass of ice nosed into Gilbert Point. From June until October, the fjord lost its connection to the Pacific Ocean at Disenchantment Bay.

While the tides stopped in Russell Fjord, the meltwater from glaciers did not. During the five-month closure, water within Russell Fjord and the connected arm of Nunatak Fjord crept upward. The water rose 85 feet above the normal high-tide line. These rainforest spruce were underwater.

When the glacier stopped advancing in October 1986, moving water blew out the glacial dam and eroded a new connection between Russell Fjord and Disenchantment Bay. The same thing happened in 2002, though for three months instead of five. That time, the water did not rise as high as in 1986.

Today, Hubbard Glacier ice towers as high as a 30-story building, with a decent gap from Gilbert Point, allowing ocean waters to pass through to the fjord, the tides pushing and pulling icebergs through the canyon. Glaciologists think the glacier will one day again pinch off Russell Fjord, because Hubbard is so massive, wrapping all the way up behind Mount Logan in Canada. Regardless of how the climate warms, all that ice has to flow downhill.

The standing dead spruce on the Russell Fjord shoreline are a monument to what can happen in this big country, almost too large for comprehension.

Today, a mated pair of mergansers share this bay of the fjord with splashing Arctic terns, recently arrived from waters off Antarctica. Hummingbirds buzz the blue lupines along the shoreline, and the air smells minty from newly burst cottonwood leaves.

I hiked less than one mile from a gravel road to reach the Russell Fjord Wilderness. In one of his last acts as president in December 1980, Jimmy Carter signed the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act, which protected this 348,701-acre buffer zone around Russell Fjord, along with so many other areas in the state.

The authors of the Wilderness Act of 1964, the guiding document for stewards of places like Russell Fjord (in this case managers of the Tongass National Forest), defined wilderness as “an area where the earth and community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor and does not remain.”

This wilderness lives up to its label. There are no boats, no passing airplanes, no plastic bottles on the beach. The moose stare at you like they’ve never seen a creature on two legs. The muddy spots on the trail feature more oval indentations of grizzly paws rather than boot prints. There is plenty of nothing in Russell Fjord, and as this visitor turned to leave, there was one less human in the wilderness area, if there were any others at all.

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 ned.rozell@alaska.edu is a science writer for the Geophysical Institute.

University of Alaska Fairbanks Chancellor Dan White will host a community meeting Tuesday, June 18, to discuss transitioning the Alaska Nanooks hockey team to the Patty Ice Arena. The meeting will begin at 5:30 p.m. at UAF’s Wood Center multilevel lounge. Members of the public are encouraged to attend.

Submit questions or comments in advance at http://bit.ly/uafhockey.

Click here to view a flyer (PDF) for the event.

University of Alaska Fairbanks Chancellor Dan White has announced that Keith Champagne will take on a new role as leader of the Alaska Nanooks intercollegiate athletics program.

Champagne, who currently serves as vice chancellor for student affairs, will assume the duties of athletics director, as well as continue to serve as the leader of UAF’s student affairs division. He will take over for Sterling Steward, who stepped down earlier today.

“In addition to Vice Chancellor Champagne’s experience in student affairs, he has a solid background in athletics,” White said in a message to the UAF community. “I am confident that under his leadership UAF athletics will grow. I look forward to working with Dr. Champagne to establish a solid foundation and vibrant future for UAF athletics.”

Champagne and White will be available to speak with media regarding the change later today, Tuesday, June 11, at 2:30 p.m. in the chancellor’s conference room on the third floor of Signers’ Hall on the Fairbanks campus. A call-in number is available: 866-832-7806 PIN 1637788.

In his new role, Champagne plans to focus more on fundraising, marketing and community engagement.

“We have something very special here. We have some of the best student athletes in the country, and we have a university and a community that believe in us and want us to be successful,” Champagne said. “I am committed to building a program that our students, faculty, staff and community will be proud to support and celebrate.”

Champagne has a bachelor’s degree in communications public relations from Loyola University, a master’s degree in communications, training and development from Clarion University of Pennsylvania, and a doctorate in educational leadership and policy studies from the University of Washington. His doctoral work focused on intercollegiate athletics leadership and sports management. Prior to joining the leadership team at UAF, he served in a variety of athletics and student services leadership positions at Central Washington University, including chief diversity officer for intercollegiate athletics and interim athletics director. He is a graduate of the Sports Management Institute and a member of the Sports Lawyers Association.

Read Champagne’s message to Nanook Nation here.

ADDITIONAL CONTACTS: Nona Letuligasenoa, 907-474-6807, nona.l@alaska.edu.

At the Hidden Falls Hatchery in Chatham Strait, three whales have tapped into a yearly all-you-can-eat buffet. The whales have learned that the hatchery releases juvenile salmon in the same place each summer, providing a reliable snack for the roaming predators.

Researchers at the University of Alaska Fairbanks College of Fisheries and Ocean Sciences and the University of Alaska Southeast have spent nine years studying the impact of this predation on hatchery fish. Now, CFOS graduate student Madison Kosma wants to understand how the predation contributes to each whale’s diet.

“Our goal was to go out before, during and after releases to get tissue samples from these individual whales to see what proportion of each whale’s diet is made up of hatchery salmon during the spring and early summer,” Kosma said. “This is important because it will help us determine how much these animals rely on hatchery fish, which could key us in to the potential impact they are having on the hatchery returns.”

Kosma is using stable isotopes in whale skin to identify and track hatchery fish in each whale’s diet. Isotopes refer to the number of neutrons carried by an element such as carbon or nitrogen. As reflected in the saying “you are what you eat,” plants and animals each have a unique balance of isotopes, called an isotopic signature, based on what they eat and the environment they live in. Studying the ratio of different isotopes in a predator’s skin and body can help reveal what that animal ate. When a humpback whale in Chatham Strait eats different kinds of fish, its isotopic signature reflects the individual signatures from all of those prey fish.

Fish released from hatcheries have a unique isotopic signature because they are fed wheat products, an ingredient not found in wild fish diets. That makes the fish easy to identify in diet-related analyses.

So how do the researchers collect whale skin samples? “We use a crossbow,” Kosma said. The crossbow launches a modified arrow that contains a yellow float (so they don’t sink underwater) and a hollowed-out tip for collecting tissue samples. When the bolt launched from the crossbow hits a whale, it removes a small plug of skin and blubber, bounces off and floats in the water where it can be easily retrieved.

The sampling technique has no adverse health effects and the sample is very small compared to the large animal. “Most whales don’t even react to being sampled,” Kosma said.

Kosma is studying both the incorporation rate of hatchery fish — how long it takes the isotopic signature of the fish to work its way into a whale’s skin — and the percentage of the whale’s diet that is made up of hatchery-released juvenile salmon. For many species, researchers can do controlled diet experiments in a lab. “We obviously can’t do that with a whale. This is pretty much the closest we can get to a controlled feeding experiment since we know exactly when and where the hatchery fish are released,” Kosma said.

Kosma collects samples before, during and after whales visit the hatchery-release buffets. She collects tissue samples from the hatchery fish as well. The timing of these samples is important, Kosma explained, because you need to see what a whale’s stable isotope signature looks like before the hatchery fish are incorporated into their diets to understand what is changing.

As Kosma is processing her isotope data, she is also thinking about why these hatcheries are beneficial locations for whales. “It’s a consistent food source,” Kosma said. “We don’t know exactly why the whales are feeding at these spots, but knowing where to consistently find food each year is beneficial especially when competition is high or resources are low.”

Kosma’s work is funded by a graduate mentor and research assistantship from the university’s Biomedical Learning and Student Training program, the Alaska Whale Foundation and Mark Kelly Photography. The Northern Southeast Regional Aquaculture Association has provided on-site support.

In addition to her isotope work, Kosma is also working to document predation techniques in the whales she studies. “I have gotten to know the three whales super well over my years studying them,” Kosma said. “Sometimes I feel like I know them better than my own family.”

Kosma recently became one of the first researchers to document pectoral herding, where whales use their pectoral fins to corral fish.

“Since the 1930s, researchers have believed that whales use their pectoral fins to assist in hunting prey,” said Kosma. “But without great aerial imaging technology, actually documenting this behavior has not been possible.”

During the 2019 Alaska Marine Science Symposium, Kosma explained her innovative method for collecting aerial imagery on pectoral herding. In her first attempt, Kosma zip-tied a GoPro camera to a 3.5-meter stick and held it out over a whale as it was lunging. Kosma quickly realized she needed to upgrade to a drone to collect her imagery. Three years later, she has a drone and the footage she needs to confirm this predatory behavior.

“Madison gave a fantastic talk and presented the use of new technology to answer a question that has been puzzling researchers for decades,” said University of Alaska Southeast researcher Jan Straley, who serves as Kosma’s co-advisor and manages the Sitka Whale Lab.

Kosma said the small discovery is one of the many benefits of her ongoing relationship with the whales of Chatham Strait. “Although this didn’t start as the main focus of my work, it has become a really fun side project to work on, and it’s great to finally provide some video evidence for our community about this behavior,” Kosma said.

YAKUTAT — On sandy barrier islands between mountains and the sea, two different birds that look alike lay their eggs side by side. Biologists here are learning more about the less common, more mysterious one.

Arctic terns and Aleutian terns gather together on ocean spits to scratch out nest cups. Each is a graceful creature that distinguishes itself from a gull by the incessant slicing of its sharp wings through the air. Arctics, loud and quick to dart at any creature that walks near a nest, have pure black heads and pumpkin-orange beaks. Aleutians, more subdued, have white eyebrow patches and black beaks.

There are more than 1 million pairs of Arctic terns worldwide, but many fewer Aleutian terns.

“There’s a small global population — about 30,000 birds breeding here and in Russia,” said Susan Oehlers, a Tongass National Forest biologist based in Yakutat. “They are probably declining, but we have very little information on them.”

Numbers of Aleutian terns at Alaska colonies have declined by 8 percent every year since 1960, biologist Heather Renner of the Alaska Maritime National Wildlife Refuge and other scientists wrote in a 2015 paper. In Alaska, Aleutian terns nest along sandy stretches of coast from Yakutat all the way up to the Bering Sea. Many more Aleutian terns breed along the coast in eastern Russia.

Researchers here in Yakutat, where residents just hosted a tern festival, are joining with others to unravel the mysteries of the Aleutian tern.

Oehlers and her colleagues have learned a lot about the birds in recent years. Using geolocator tags and satellite transmitters attached to breeding Aleutian terns, they have found where the birds have gone once they leave Alaska for the winter. Not long ago, no one knew.

Arctic terns fly almost the circumference of the Earth each year to spend summers in the far North and winters in Antarctica. Aleutian terns go almost as far another way.

In 2017, scientists in Yakutat and Dillingham fitted 15 Aleutian terns with backpack satellite transmitters. The birds migrated in fall from the sweep of the Aleutian Islands all the way to equatorial islands of Indonesia.

“It’s pretty much an Indonesia bird,” said biologist Sanjay Pyare of the University of Alaska Southeast.

Pyare traveled to Indonesia through the U.S. Fulbright Program in October 2018. For five months, he worked with local scientists and sought out the terns in wild, productive ocean environments, like the Riau and Metawai archipelagoes off Sumatra, and in the Sunda Strait near Krakatoa, which is between Java and Sumatra.

Closer to Alaska, Renner, with Alaska’s maritime refuge, traveled to Sakhalin Island in far-east Russia in 2018. There, she and other U.S. and Russian colleagues checked out three colonies of breeding Aleutian terns. They saw fewer birds than Russian scientists had reported in earlier surveys.

Here in Yakutat, Aleutian tern numbers looked good in early June 2019 when Forest Service biologist Gwen Baluss surveyed them at a barrier island at the mouth of the Situk River. This summer, researchers in Yakutat and elsewhere will continue their detective work on a sleek bird that each year quietly traverses half the planet.

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.

On Thursday, June 13, at approximately 8:30 p.m. the University Fire Department was dispatched to a structure fire at the Fairbanks Princess Riverside Lodge on Pikes Landing Road in Fairbanks. Firefighters arrived to find a fire located in the hotel’s kitchen area that had extended into the floor and began burning in the wooden support structure. Firefighters made an aggressive attack and were able to keep the fire from further extending into other parts of the building.

About 500 to 600 guests and staff members were evacuated from the structure as firefighters worked to extinguish the fire. The University Fire Department commends the staff members and guests at the hotel for their quick and orderly evacuation. Princess arranged for the off-site transportation of all guests.

No injuries were reported. The UFD fire marshal and the Alaska State Fire Marshal’s office are investigating the cause and origin of the fire. Emergency activities at the hotel have concluded, and Princess is working on a plan to admit guests back into the hotel.

Multiple local organizations assisted with the response to this incident, including the Fairbanks Fire Department, Fort Wainwright Fire Department, Chena Goldstream Fire and Rescue, Ester Volunteer Fire Department, Steese Volunteer Fire Department, North Star Volunteer Fire Department, North Pole Fire Department, Eielson Air Force Base Fire Department, Fairbanks North Star Borough Hazardous Materials Response Team, Fairbanks North Star Borough Emergency Operations, Airport Police and Fire, Alaska State Troopers, American Red Cross, and Golden Valley Electric Association. A total of 78 responders supported this incident with seven engines, four ambulances, three ladder trucks and three police units as well as support vehicles and equipment from the borough and Red Cross.

MEDIA CONTACT: Fire Chief Doug Schrage, 907-474-5770, drschrage@alaska.edu.

New research shows an iceless Greenland may be in the future. If worldwide greenhouse gas emissions remain on their current trajectory, Greenland may be ice-free by the year 3000. Even by the end of the century, the island could lose 4.5% of its ice, contributing up to 13 inches of sea level rise.

“How Greenland will look in the future — in a couple of hundred years or in 1,000 years — whether there will be Greenland, or at least a Greenland similar to today, it’s up to us,” said Andy Aschwanden, a research associate professor at the University of Alaska Fairbanks Geophysical Institute.

Aschwanden is lead author on a new study published in the June issue of Science Advances. UAF Geophysical Institute researchers Mark Fahnestock, Martin Truffer, Regine Hock and Constantine Khrulev are co-authors, as is Doug Brinkerhoff, a former UAF graduate student.

This research uses new data on the landscape under the ice today to make breakthroughs in modeling the future. The findings show a wide range of scenarios for ice loss and sea level rise based on different projections for greenhouse gas concentrations and atmospheric conditions. Currently, the planet is moving toward the high estimates of greenhouse gas concentrations.

Greenland’s ice sheet is huge, spanning over 660,000 square miles. It is almost the size of Alaska and 80% as big as the U.S. east of the Mississippi River. Today, the ice sheet covers 81% of Greenland and contains 8% of Earth’s fresh water.

If greenhouse gas concentrations remain on the current path, the melting ice from Greenland alone could contribute as much as 24 feet to global sea level rise by the year 3000, which would put much of San Francisco, Los Angeles, New Orleans and other cities under water.

However, if greenhouse gas emissions are cut significantly, that picture changes. Instead, by 3000 Greenland may lose 8% to 25% of ice and contribute up to approximately 6.5 feet of sea level rise. Between 1991 and 2015, Greenland’s ice sheet has added about 0.02 inches per year to sea level, but that could rapidly increase.

Projections for both the end of the century and 2200 tell a similar story: There are a wide range of possibilities, including saving the ice sheet, but it all depends on greenhouse gas emissions.

The researchers ran 500 simulations for each of the three climate scenarios using the Parallel Ice Sheet Model, developed at the Geophysical Institute, to create a picture of how Greenland’s ice would respond to different climate scenarios. The model included parameters on ocean and atmospheric conditions as well as ice geometry, flow and thickness.

Simulating ice sheet behavior is difficult because ice loss is led by the retreat of outlet glaciers. These glaciers, at the margins of ice sheets, drain the ice from the interior like rivers, often in troughs hidden under the ice itself.

This study is the first model to include these outlet glaciers. It found that their discharge could contribute as much as 45% of the total mass of ice lost in Greenland by 2200.

Outlet glaciers are in contact with water, and water makes ice melt faster than contact with air, like thawing a chicken in the sink. The more ice touches water, the faster it melts. This creates a feedback loop that dramatically affects the ice sheet.

However, to simulate how the ice flows, the scientists need to know how thick the ice is.

The team used data from a NASA airborne science campaign called Operation IceBridge. Operation IceBridge uses aircraft equipped with a full suite of scientific instruments, including three types of radar that can measure the ice surface, the individual layers within the ice and penetrate to the bedrock to collect data about the land beneath the ice. On average, Greenland’s ice sheet is 1.6 miles thick, but there is a lot of variation depending on where you measure.

“Ice is in very remote locations,” said Fahnestock. “You can go there and make localized measurements. But the view from space and the view from airborne campaigns, like IceBridge, has just fundamentally transformed our ability to make a model to mimic those changes.”

Because previous research results lacked these details, scientists could not simulate present-day conditions as accurately, which makes it more difficult to predict what will happen in the future.

“If it’s raining in D.C. today, your best guess is that it’s raining tomorrow, too,” Aschwanden said. “If you don’t know what the weather is today, it’s all guessing.”

However, that doesn’t mean researchers know exactly what will happen.

“What we know from the last two decades of just watching Greenland is not because we were geniuses and figured it out, but because we just saw it happen,” Fahnestock said. As for what we will see in the future, “it depends on what we are going to do next.”

Sarah Manriquez, an art student at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, has no desire to be a “starving artist.”

Professional Practices for Visual Artists, a UAF course offered online and face-to-face, is designed to help students like Manriquez acquire the skills they need to keep practicing their craft after the safety net of university life disappears: No more free studio space, no more materials, no more hands-on instruction, and no more built-in community of fellow artists.

“Too many students leave the arts because they don’t know how to recreate those things for themselves in a sustainable way,” instructor Madara Mason said. The course is open to any practicing artist, anywhere in the world, with at least 10 pieces of existing artwork.

“I try to give students the courage to claim the title of ‘artist’ and wrap their arms around the painful process of making and sharing things that might not be perfect,” Mason added.

Assignments lead to functioning websites, a business plan and at least one sales venue with a way for them to make money.

“Being a successful artist is so much more than being talented,” said Manriquez, who is focusing on photography, film and music performance. “You must be an entrepreneur of sorts, incredibly self-motivated, social media savvy and have some innate business skills as well.”

Manriquez has four photography exhibitions planned for the coming year and was awarded funding from the UAF Undergraduate Research and Scholarly Activity program, outcomes that are direct results of course assignments about solo exhibition applications and grant writing.

Christen Bouffard juggles a full-time job, her small business and part-time classes as she works toward a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in sculpture and metalsmithing. She said the course helped streamline her workflows and set up business-related finances, tasks that can easily get pushed down the priority list.

“Financially, this is the first year I’ve started Q1 with my projected budget for the year already in place and a formalized system for tracking income and expenses,” she said.

Mason’s students are actively involved in each other’s success, make connections in their local art communities and engage with others worldwide via social media.

She created the #artisapractice hashtag, encouraging students to share the imperfect process of making art. During the last year the hashtag has been used nearly 2,000 times on Instagram.

“#artisapractice is meant to help them build a thick skin for sharing what they make, whether it’s a total disaster or a work of brilliance,” she said.

“The art world tends to be a culture of criticism, and I think it should be a culture of community instead.”

On a Saturday morning near summer solstice, nine people stood on a smoothed pile of gravel at Mile 5 of the Dalton Highway. A man talking to the group, the fur of a wolverine wrapping his head, had invited us to what he called AlaskAcross 2019, a nonstop 60-mile hiking traverse in northern Alaska, from Lost Creek to Eureka.

Mark Ross, wearing the wolverine fur, is a naturalist at Creamer’s Field Migratory Waterfowl Refuge in Fairbanks. He invented this cross-country, unsupported event and alerted those who might be interested with a series of sporadic emails.

Two other recipients had asked me along. I knew better, but said yes; here was my yearly opportunity to mark the light and energy of summer solstice by — just once — staying up all night.

After an awkward group photo, Mark said go. The nine of us filed onto a four-wheeler trail that led off the highway and into the boreal forest.

After one of my partners bailed because he wisely figured we might not finish the endeavor before the start of a family vacation two nights away, I was walking next to Jay Cable.

Writer Craig Medred described Jay as an “Alaska hardman” in a story about Jay and Tom Moran winning the summer 2018 Wilderness Classic, a longer, more difficult version of Mark Ross’ race. A friend who had done a trip with Jay a week earlier had called him a beast.

I giggled nervously as I thought of keeping up with Jay over the hill and dale ahead. But I had traveled with him before under similar circumstances. He is a cheery guy, and didn’t seem to mind waiting for me after he had bull-moosed ahead.

Jay works for the Geographic Information Network of Alaska at the University of Alaska Fairbanks Geophysical Institute, which means he spends a lot of time looking at satellite images, which means he had a route mapped out with a red line spilled over maps on several electronic devices, backed up by paper maps.

Like most of the other participants, Jay wore something that looked like a daypack, only smaller. I giggled nervously at my pack, which could fit all the stuff you needed for a week’s trip. But, as we agreed beforehand, there would be no tent; we would try to complete the 60 miles through tundra valleys and hopefully rocky ridges in one push.

As we gained the first ridgetop, the one shown as pale yellow on topo maps, we entered a dream landscape of flowing white. From a distance, it looked like blowing snow. Cottongrass is a lovely sedge of waving white seed balls, as soft as a puppy’s belly. It grows throughout the far North, in acidic bogs.

Bog is not what we had hoped for on those hilltops. For more than a marathon distance, our steps were squish and sponge in faint four-wheeler tracks pressed into the elevated swamps. At one point, Mark pushed a basket-less ski pole into the soft mat until it stopped at the frozen ground beneath. That permafrost barrier to water drainage was less than a foot below the warm air of summer.

At that same brief pause, Mark got excited at Jay’s mention of a wood frog he saw in one of the puddles on the ridge, a few hundred feet and several miles from the nearest tree. Somehow, these creatures with the hearts and brains that thawed about a month ago had hopped their way up to this tundra bench.

After Mark disappeared on his own route and Jay and I continued into the endless day, the natural rewards continued. We heard the song of the American robin, familiar to every human living in North America, here making a summer go of it in the unpeopled dense alders and spruce beneath Sawtooth Mountain.

We skirted around the bottom of that hulk, with its black jagged rocks on top, a landmark that attracted race participants to get to know it better after seeing the mountain from hilltops near Fairbanks.

None of us hiked to the top of the 4,494-foot Sawtooth Mountain, so we all missed the mine on top. From a hole in the ground up there, Alaska independence advocate Joe Vogler in 1950 removed 500 tons of antimony. The lustrous gray metalloid is mixed with lead to make it stronger, and is used as flame retardant in children’s clothes and car-seat covers.

We passed beneath Vogler’s wilderness mine at 2 a.m. The air smelled earthy, of cool, damp moss. The sun had dipped behind Sawtooth Mountain about 45 minutes before. With summer solstice less than a week away (June 21 at 7:54 a.m. in Alaska), the night was bright enough to read a map, even in a tunnel of alders.

After 24 hours of travel, our backs again felt the sunshine at 10 a.m. The warmth overrode our circadian rhythms that had screamed sleep during the dusky hours.

We then started to ascend our last significant obstacle — Elephant Mountain. Once we traversed that massif, which sports a rock formation that after a day without sleep really looks like an elephant’s head, all we needed to do was find a dog-musher’s trail that led to the finish. That was in Eureka, at Wild and Free Mushing, the kennel and home of 2019 Yukon Quest winner Brent Sass.

We were on Elephant Mountain for seven miles and seven hours, making it easy to calculate our pace. From the top, we saw a bend of the Yukon River to the north and the million lakes of Minto Flats to the south.

Lichen fields on the mountain had once held the footprints of Rocky Reifenstuhl, a longtime Alaska geologist and bike-and-foot-racing legend. Rocky died in 2014 at the age of 61 due to heart problems.

Rocky walked all over Elephant Mountain in the 1990s, describing it in terms that expose geology as one of the most challenging disciplines to translate: “Its composition ranges from diorite to granite, but it mostly is trachytoidal, quartz-free syenite and subequigranular quartz syenite.”

We were on our 35th hour without sleep when we plunged off Elephant Mountain into the thick brush and mosquitoes of the forest. I thought a bit about Rocky as I struggled to keep up with Jay, who was busting through the brush like the scared mama moose we saw running across the tundra, trailing her orange calf.

“You go into a completely different state of mind,” Rocky once told Fairbanks Daily News-Miner reporter Tim Mowry regarding his sleepless treks across Alaska. “I love to see what my body can achieve.”

With Jay enduring my hobble along a nice firm trail to the finish, we arrived at the extra-long driveway of Wild and Free Mushing. Through a fog of mosquitoes lit by the slanted rays of 11 p.m. solstice sunshine, Jay and I saw our friend Trusten Peery walking toward us. Behind him, on the hood of his truck, we saw two pizza boxes.

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.

Alaska Sea Grant has selected three individuals for its year-long fellowship program.

Meredith Pochardt will spend her fellowship at the National Marine Fisheries Service, Alaska Region, in Juneau. The agency, a part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, is also known as NOAA Fisheries. Pochardt recently graduated with a master of fisheries science degree from Oregon State University. She will work in the Office of Habitat Conservation assisting researchers with their habitat conservation and fisheries management needs, including the synthesis of environmental data to develop habitat variables and statistical analyses of habitat data. Pochardt will begin her fellowship in August.

Madison Kosma will work in Anchorage in the Office of Protected Resources, also within NOAA Fisheries’ Alaska Region. Starting in September, Kosma will focus on a Cook Inlet beluga whale citizen-scientist project, as well as beluga monitoring research. She will also develop outreach materials for sighting data of North Pacific right whales. Kosma expects to graduate with her master’s degree in fisheries from the University of Alaska Fairbanks this fall.

Katlyn Haven, a recent Oregon State University graduate, will spend her fellowship at the National Park Service in Anchorage. Haven will support several management projects, including lagoon monitoring, ocean acidification monitoring, and the development of digital image libraries for zooplankton and phytoplankton monitoring. Haven received her master’s degree in marine resource management from OSU this spring and will begin her fellowship in July.

“We’re very pleased to welcome this new cohort of promising and talented graduate students to our fellowship program. Since we launched the program five years ago, we have seen most of our fellows go on to land great jobs with state and federal agencies that serve the needs of coastal Alaska,” said Heather Brandon, director of Alaska Sea Grant.

Alaska Sea Grant is a statewide program headquartered within the UAF College of Fisheries and Ocean Sciences. It is part of the National Sea Grant Program, a division of NOAA.

The Alaska Sea Grant State Fellowship program is modeled after the Knauss Marine Policy Fellowship, which places highly motivated young professionals in federal agencies in Washington, D.C., or in Congress. Both fellowships provide experience and networking opportunities that help recipients transition from academic study to successful careers. More information about Sea Grant fellowships, including the Alaska Sea Grant State Fellowship, is available on the web.

The University of Alaska Fairbanks’ Alaska Center for Energy and Power is hosting a free webinar series this summer to discuss renewable energy projects. The series will feature Alaskans sharing how such projects have helped communities improve their energy and food security.

Participants can learn about advocating for supportive energy policy, working on renewable energy projects and understanding the technical aspects of energy integration.

Click on the linked webinar titles below to register. All webinars begin at 9 a.m. The dates are:

• June 27 — “Biomass-heated Greenhouses,”  Karen Petersen (Southeast Conference)

• July 11 — “Wind Energy in the Arctic,” Matt Bergan (Kotzebue Electric Association)

• July 25 — “Multicommunity Energy Perspectives,” Meera Kohler (Alaska Village Electric Cooperative)

• Aug. 8 — “Policy and Energy,” Chris Rose (Renewable Energy Alaska Project)

• Sept. 26 — “Geothermal Energy for Power and Heat,” Gwen Holdmann (Alaska Center for Energy and Power)

Each webinar will be livestreamed online through registration links. Webinars will include a 15- to 25-minute presentation followed by time for questions and discussion. The presentations will be recorded and posted for access via the ACEP website.

For more information on the Arctic Community Energy Webinar Series, contact Amanda Byrd at agbyrd@alaska.edu.

The University of Alaska Fairbanks has announced the students named to the deans’ and chancellor’s lists for the spring 2019 semester. The lists recognize students’ outstanding academic achievements.

Students receiving a 3.9 grade point average or higher are placed on the chancellor’s list, while those receiving a grade point average of between 3.5 and 3.89 are named to the deans’ list.

UAF is a Land, Sea and Space Grant institution, and is the leading doctoral degree-granting institution in the state of Alaska. Since it was founded in 1917, UAF has been internationally recognized for research relating to the Arctic and sub-Arctic, in areas such as biology, geophysics, engineering, natural resources and global climate change.

NOTE TO EDITORS: Students who have earned academic honors but have requested that their directory information remain confidential may not appear on the public honors list.

• Chancellor’s list
• Deans’ list

Arctic researchers traveled to western Alaska last month to gather snow depth data, which they believe may be a missing link needed to improve how global climate models predict changing Arctic conditions.

Rapid warming is transforming the Arctic, triggering a cascade of changes across entire ecosystems. Scientists are grappling with how to incorporate degrading permafrost, the expansion of northern shrubs and disturbances such as wildfires into global climate models.

University of Alaska Fairbanks researchers are collaborating with several U.S. Department of Energy national laboratories on a project called Next-Generation Ecosystem Experiments Arctic to improve predictions of Arctic environmental change.

“Our goal is to measure it, translate data into equations, and incorporate those into computer models,” said NGEE Arctic director Stan Wullschleger in a recent interview.

One important question NGEE Arctic is exploring is where, when and why the Arctic is becoming wetter or dryer, and what the implications are for the climate system. The answer could improve how models represent carbon, energy and water processes in the Arctic.

“Current global climate models aren’t built to transition from a very wet environment to a very dry environment,” said hydrologist Bob Bolton from UAF’s International Arctic Research Center. “They currently don’t represent these big landscape transitions.”

In some areas of the Arctic, that is exactly what is happening. Degrading permafrost can cause the ground to slump and ponds to form, making the environment wetter. In other places, the permanently frozen ground thaws, the ground more easily drains and the landscape becomes drier.

Although it sounds bizarre, thawing permafrost isn’t just a summer problem. Winter and snow play a role too.

“It’s all about insulation,” Bolton said. “Snow insulates either warmer or colder.” The amount depends, in part, on how early and deeply the snow accumulates each autumn and how rapidly it melts each spring.

An early snowfall in autumn may trap summer heat in the ground, giving permafrost more time to degrade even as outside temperatures drop. The opposite is true with a late snowfall in spring. If the ground refreezes after the snowfall, additional cold can be trapped in the surface soils, delaying summer thaw.

However, snow is extremely variable across the Arctic, and depths can be difficult to predict. An unsuspecting winter traveler may suddenly plunge from knee-deep to waist-deep snow in only a few steps.

What makes snow accumulate in some areas but not others? To find out, Bolton and colleagues at Los Alamos National Laboratory are painstakingly inventorying the snow pack across multiple study sites near Nome.

It is becoming clear that shrubs play a big part. They trap snow, and that deeper snow adds insulation.

“We have hints that in shrubby areas the permafrost is either completely degraded or degrading much more rapidly than in non-shrubby areas,” said Bolton.

The interconnected nature of the Arctic makes NGEE Arctic’s multidisciplinary expertise valuable. With researchers at Oak Ridge, Los Alamos, Brookhaven and Lawrence Berkeley national laboratories, as well as UAF, the team is well prepared to explore the complexity of vegetation ecology, biogeochemistry and hydrology across the Arctic system.

“We knew going in that we were going to study certain processes, such as vegetation dynamics and the microbial production of carbon dioxide and methane. But, as it turns out, all of those processes are coupled and interconnected,” explained Wullschleger.

The multidisciplinary environment gets Bolton excited about field work.

“I enjoy spending time in the field talking science and bouncing ideas back and forth,” he said. “Stan’s a veg guy. We have different perspectives. He looks at a shrub much differently than I do. I just see it as a thing on the landscape that traps snow.”

In addition to the challenges of understanding a complex and changing ecosystem, NGEE Arctic faces the challenge of gathering data during the winter at a site accessible only by snowmachine or helicopter.

Weather conditions can abruptly shift, so NGEE Arctic crews always prepare to spend the night in the field. Field safety officer Bob Busey, an engineer at the International Arctic Research Center, makes sure crews are as safe and comfortable as possible.

“My role first is to make sure that everybody stays safe, and then my second role is that we collect as high of quality of data as possible,” said Busey. He packs a large safety kit for the field site, complete with an Arctic Oven tent and wood stove, but even the helicopter and personal backpacks receive smaller versions.

Busey’s field philosophy goes beyond just physical safety. He focuses on creating a healthy atmosphere by encouraging friendliness, humor, adequate sleep, upfront communication and the occasional gourmet gummy bear.

 NGEE Arctic is funded by the Office of Biological and Environmental Research in the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science.

The relocation of an Alaska village is happening fast this summer, after many years of planning and work. Observers say Newtok’s transition to Mertarvik is flying along because it has to — the Ninglick River bank is crumbling less than 10 yards from a Newtok home.

“There’s no more time,” said Aaron Cooke, an architect who helped design new houses for the project. “The water’s right by the houses (in the village of Newtok).”

After voting to move their river-threatened village more than 20 years ago, residents of Newtok are in summer 2019 building 13 new houses on the volcanic rock of Nelson Island, 12 miles from Newtok. They also hope to finish a community center that might serve as a school this fall.

“Holy moly, this is the year it finally hit a sprint,” said Cooke, an architect for the Cold Climate Housing Research Center in Fairbanks. Cooke and his colleagues have designed energy-efficient homes for Mertarvik.

Workers at the new townsite are also building roads and a power station, as well as further developing the rock quarry and landfill. Those swinging hammers and steering heavy equipment include Newtok residents, U.S. Marines, people from the Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium and workers for Native-owned contracting companies.

Relocations of Alaska villages — often prompted by floods or shifting river channels — have happened as long as people have lived here. The Newtok-to-Mertarvik move is different, because Newtok is a modern village with electric power distribution, frame houses and a landfill. Newtok people also voted to move, made a plan and are following it.

“If they hadn’t been planning all those years, it would have been a hot mess over there,” Cooke said. “Now that the water’s finally reached the first row of houses, they’ve got a plan.”

Since 1958, Newtok, home of about 350 people, has been one of about 200 Alaska villages on waterways off the state’s road system. That year, a barge carrying materials for a new school for Old Kealavik bottomed out in sand and mud on the Ninglick River. Workers unloaded the materials on a low-lying spot near where the Kealavik River flowed into the Ninglick. Carpenters built the Newtok school there, and the village got its start.

Since then, more than nine football fields of land have dissolved into the river and sea, including the old dump site and barge landing.

This summer, construction noise is ringing over the tundra at the higher-elevation village site called Mertarvik, Yup’ik for “place to get water.” Residents hope the community center there will be functional for use as a school by this fall.

“You need that foothold,” Cooke said. “When Mertarvik is an official place, people will go there.”

Cooke has worked with Newtok residents since about 2008, when, as a master’s student, he designed the first version of the Mertarvik community center that may be completed this summer. The building has taken many years to become reality; villagers used funding along the way to do what they could. The piling foundation, for example, was completed in 2011 and has been waiting for money for a shell.

Starting a long time ago when villagers picked a new village site, funding sources have been many and varied, and workers have picked off projects over the years.

“One of the greatest things we’ve learned along the way is you don’t have to wait for a giant pot of money,” Cooke said.

Cooke and his team will visit Mertarvik five times between now and October, and he’s excited to see the progress of what he hopes will be a success story.

He said that in a decade or so, “We’ll have examples of communities that moved successfully and others that didn’t make it work. I think people are looking at Newtok very closely, to see the time it takes, the cost, and the obstacles to problem-solving.”

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.

The University of Alaska Fairbanks is offering free exercise opportunities and showers for evacuees of the Shovel Creek Fire.

The UAF Student Recreation Center is waiving its day fees for evacuees who would like to use its exercise facilities, including the weight and cardio equipment, swimming pool and ice skating rink. SRC schedules can be viewed online at uaf.edu/recreation. Showers are also available in the Patty Center by visiting the SRC front desk. Identification is required.

The UAF Wood Center will also be open from 7 a.m. to 6 p.m. through Wednesday, July 3, for access to its showers and laundry facilities.

Free visitor parking is available on the UAF campus in the west end of the Nenana lot, which is located across Tanana Loop near SRC.

Randy Smith Middle School has been designated as the shelter for evacuees from the Shovel Creek Fire, which is burning in the Murphy Dome area north of Fairbanks.