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During Patrick Druckenmiller’s not-so-restful sabbatical year of 2015, he flew to museums around the world. In Alberta and then London, the University of Alaska Museum of the North’s earth science curator looked at bones of dinosaurs similar to ones found in northern Alaska.

The more he squinted at them and chatted with experts, the more he concluded far-north dinosaurs are like Alaskans compared to other Americans: kind of the same, but a little off.

“When we really re-examine the fauna, (northern Alaska) is a very weird place,” said Druckenmiller, who today is also the museum director.

The mini tyrannosaur, duck-billed swamp-stompers, armor-headed plant-eaters and other dinosaurs found in northern Alaska hint of a story that is theirs alone. That tale is separate from the one we learned as kids, told by fossils found in Montana, Alberta, Mongolia and other more exposed and easier-to-get-to places.

Druckenmiller’s examinations of the duck-billed dinosaurs found in Alberta led to the declaration of a new Alaska hadrosaur species due to slight but significant differences in body structure.

“They’re close but they’re different,” Druckenmiller said. “It’s true for fish, dinosaurs and mammals. There’s no obvious gene flow between areas.”

The story of the northern dinosaur is late in arriving because Alaska is late in being explored. But paleontologists have filled the basement of the university museum with the world’s largest collection of polar dinosaur bones and tracks encased in rock. Researchers are using them to write a separate narrative for the creatures who lived in a place of extremes 70 million years ago.

“This ecosystem has no true modern analogue,” wrote Alexei Herman of the Russian Academy of Sciences. In a recent paper, he and others tried to reconstruct Arctic climate at the time of the dinosaurs. They used plant fossils found in Alaska and western Siberia. “It existed under a polar light regime similar to that of the present day but experienced a temperature regime far warmer than now.”

Northern dinosaurs seem to have experienced a cloudy, Juneau-like climate with Utqiaġvik’s four months of darkness. How the 13 species of meat and plant-eaters endured is a fun question for paleontologists. Did dinosaurs migrate south during the dark season? Did they have special adaptations that helped them stay?

“Cold wasn’t slowing them down; they were doing just fine,” Druckenmiller said. “What’s interesting is what we don’t find on the North Slope. We find no amphibians, crocodiles, turtles or lizards up here. It was cold enough to exclude classic ectotherms.”

The story of the northern dinosaur gets more intriguing every time someone like Druckenmiller looks at a geological map of Alaska and chooses to float a river that flows through rock the same age as the dinosaurs. An example: To the seasoned eye, the sandstones and mudstones of the middle Yukon provide as many samples as a dinosaur hunter wants to carry.

“It’s a great place to find tracks,” Druckenmiller said. “All of a sudden you get off the boat and there’s track, track, track, track.”

And there is so much left out there. Though the tundra landscape hides the detailed story of northern dinosaurs (no one has yet found fossilized dinosaur eggs in northern Alaska, which would prove they bred there), there are places where bones and tracks are right on the surface.

“I’ve got a lot of places on my list I want to go,” Druckenmiller said.

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 appeared in 2015.

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The University of Alaska Fairbanks Alumni Association will hold its annual reunion weekend from July 18-20 in Fairbanks.

UAF alumni from all years are invited to attend Nanook Rendezvous 2019, which begins at 4:30 p.m. Thursday, with a welcome picnic at the Georgeson Botanical Garden. The UAF Summer Music Festival’s American Roots ensemble will perform at 7 p.m.

Friday activities include a tour of the UAF campus, a visit to the new KSUA studios, an open house at the Office of Intellectual Property and Commercialization, and Nanook night at the Alaska Goldpanners baseball game. On Saturday, alumni may participate in the Golden Days Grande Parade, which will include a UAF entry, followed by food and drinks at Salty’s on 2nd in downtown Fairbanks.

Throughout the weekend, reunion attendees will have free admission to the Student Recreation Center on campus and discounted admission to the University of Alaska Museum of the North.

Space is limited for some events, so early registration is encouraged. Information and registration are available at www.uaf.edu/alumni/get-involved/reunion/.

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The Rural Alaska Honors Institute will host a graduation ceremony at 1 p.m., July 11, at the University of Alaska Fairbanks.

The ceremony will be held in Schaible Auditorium and livestreamed at media.uaf.edu.

Fifty rural and Alaska Native high school students, representing more than 30 communities across the state, graduate after six weeks of academics and on-campus living at UAF this year. They explored fields such as writing, library sciences, process technology, chemistry, business, math, recreation and, for the first time ever, Alaska Native languages. Six students also gained hands-on experience working on two different projects with UAF researchers.

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Their weekends included hiking the 8.7 miles from Angel Rocks to Chena Hot Springs, rafting in Denali and volunteering at Calypso Farms.

Since its inception in 1983, RAHI has prepared more than 1,950 students for the rigors of higher education. Graduates have gone on to obtain 929 degrees and 187 certificates from not only from the University of Alaska but also other institutions such as Harvard, Yale and Brown universities, Dartmouth College and the universities of Notre Dame and California, Berkeley.

RAHI is supported by the University of Alaska, the UAF College of Rural and Community Development and the UAF Biomedical Learning and Student Training program. Community sponsors include Wells Fargo, New York Life, Alyeska Pipeline Service Co., Arctic Slope Community Foundation, First National Bank of Alaska, ConocoPhillips, Ravn Alaska and various private donors. RAHI students attend at no cost and have travel expenses paid.

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The 2019 RAHI participants included Erik Attla, Fairbanks; Gabriel Miller, Ninilchik; Glenn Balanza, Utqiagvik; Tory Nassuk, White Mountain; Alexia Bankston, Utqiagvik; Sadie Newton, King Cove; Elena Basargin, Fritz Creek; Savannah Nieshe, Ketchikan; Alani Chase, Northway; Lena Norton, Noatak; Draven Clavette, Dillingham; Lillian “Jing” O’Brien, Wrangell; Sean Conwell, Unalaska; Juliana “Julie” Osgood, Utqiagvik; Logan Copper, Tok; Bridget Oviok, Point Hope; Chiara Demientieff, Bethel; Ebony Oviok, Point Hope; Stephanie Eakin, Kotzebue; Max Pyles, Kodiak; Amyaa Edwards-Davis, Utqiagvik; Alice Sage, Buckland; Ruth Finau, Glennallen; Cortland “Cort” Stewart, Metlakatla; Ariel “JR” Go, Unalaska; Jenna Stringer, Utqiagvik; Adele Hagevig, Douglas; Dorcas Swan, Deering; Willow Jackson, Kake; Mistelle Titus, Healy; James John, Kipnuk; Katelyn Tocktoo, Nome; Grace Keller, Valdez; Alleri Tungul, Unalaska; Angelina Kimoktoak, Koyuk; Kayla Villamor, Unalaska; Tara Kirk, Kotzebue; James Vuong, Unalaska; Eli Knapp, Big Lake; Madelin “Mady” Weeks, Kenai; Erik Kohrt, Fairbanks; Whitney “Olivia” Wilcox, Sitka; Leisha Lozano, Kongiganek; Hailey Wilson, Unalaska; Katelyn Marks, Fairbanks; Timothy Zibell, Noorvik; Jalaya Duarte, King Cove; Mackenzie Fousel, Ketchikan; Robin Masterman, Bethel; Alexis Rexford, Gambell; and Ellie Martinson, Nome.

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KUAC FM will be off the air for about a week, beginning the afternoon of July 22, to install a new transmitter and antenna on Ester Dome. The work will increase the public radio station’s reliability and on-air consistency.

 “We would like to stress that taking KUAC FM off the air is necessary in order to complete the project and has nothing to do with the current state budget situation,” said Keith Martin, KUAC general manager.

During construction, listeners will be able to receive KUAC FM by livestreaming at KUAC.org on their computers, smartphones or tablets. They may also tune into KUAC TV 9.6, use the NPR app on their smartphones or tablets, or ask their smart speakers to play KUAC.

The equipment to be replaced is over 23 years old and is beyond its life expectancy. The new equipment will make KUAC FM less susceptible to weather-related problems and power outages.

In addition to Fairbanks and areas nearby, the communities of Nenana, Delta Junction and Healy will be affected by the outage because their translators rebroadcast a signal from the transmitter on Ester Dome. Bettles, Eagle, Nome and Tok will still receive KUAC FM over the air, as their translators are fed via satellite.

Members of the public and find information throughout the construction by visiting KUAC.org and following KUAC on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. KUAC is a service of the University of Alaska Fairbanks.

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Forty-one volcanoes that have erupted since the 1700s. Eleven percent of the world’s earthquakes. Glaciers of an ever-changing number that probably tops 100,000. Alaska has its share of superlatives, and here’s another one — Alaska has the largest maar on Earth.

What’s a maar? It looks a lot like a lake, it’s circular and it exists because of colossal explosions that happened when molten rock met water. Jim Beget has visited the world’s largest set of maars, located on the northern horn of the Seward Peninsula east of Shishmaref.

Landforms shaped in dramatic fashion intrigue Beget, retired from the Alaska Volcano Observatory and University of Alaska Fairbanks Department of Geosciences. He has visited the Devil Mountain Lakes maar, the largest one on Earth.

The Seward Peninsula, home to Nome, Shishmaref, Elim, and other towns and villages, seems an unlikely place for volcanoes. Unlike in the Aleutian Islands, on the Alaska Peninsula, or in the Wrangell Mountains, the Seward Peninsula has no cone-shaped, steaming peaks. But the nose of Alaska that juts into the Bering Sea has several circular lakes that hint at the area’s steamy past.

The Devil Mountain Lakes maar is about 5 miles in diameter. About 60 miles southwest of Kotzebue, it formed about 21,000 years ago, when volcanic eruptions forced their way through permafrost. The frozen ground created the exceptional size of the maar, Beget said.

Maars form when lava hits ground water, a shallow lake or permafrost, because water expands by 1,000 times when it turns to steam. The permafrost at the Devil Lakes site provided a steady supply of water for the rising lava, making the northern Seward Peninsula a loud place about 21,000 years ago.

“Devil Mountain was a big eruption with lots of magma, and because every bit of the ground had ice in it, it remained explosive as long as the eruption occurred,” Beget said.

The result was one of about a dozen maars in Alaska, and the largest known maar crater in the world.

Volcanoes’ interaction with permafrost results in one unusual Alaska landform, and Beget also studied another — a landscape covered with boulders that a giant earthquake shook loose from a mountain.

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North of Cantwell and east of the Parks Highway stands Panorama Mountain, a hulk of pointy black spires. Look on the west side of the mountain, Beget said, and you see a gash from a prehistoric rock avalanche that traveled across the Nenana River. Just across the river and visible from the highway are former chunks of Panorama Mountain as large as houses.

Panorama Mountain sits on the western end of the Denali fault. The eastern portion of the fault ruptured in the magnitude 7.9 earthquake of 2002, the largest earthquake on the planet that year. Scientists are trying to find out when the fault last ripped at its western end, the part that runs beneath the Parks Highway and near Cantwell.

Beget and research partner Mary Keskinen looked at the lichens clinging to the rocks that fell during the Panorama Mountain slide. The oldest lichens on the rocks date back to 400 years, making the geologists think that the last great earthquake on the western portion of the fault may have happened about the year 1600 or so. Since then, the fault has been building up stress, perhaps similar to the energy that the great 2002 earthquake released.

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 2006.

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Clik here to view.The University of Alaska Fairbanks offers its students an exceptional online special education and teaching program, according to a top rating organization for online instruction systems.

Quality Matters, which promotes high-caliber online education, designated UAF’s online special education and teaching program as “exemplary.” UAF is the first university to earn that status from QM in any field.

Exemplary programs are those that earn QM certifications in four areas within three years. UAF’s special education and teaching program earned its fourth certification — in online learner success — in June. It previously was recognized for program design, teaching support and learner support.

“I completed a master’s degree in special education completely online through UAF while I was teaching full-time,” said Kristy Robbins, principal and teacher at Eagle Community School in eastern Alaska. “The quality of the program was first-rate all the way. While the coursework was often challenging, I always felt supported. The flexibility of the teaching staff and their understanding of my unique situation made my experience very personal.”

QM’s exemplary program distinction confirms that UAF provides the key parts of a high-quality online program where students learn what they need.

“Our goal is for every online student to maximize their achievement and obtain the tools and knowledge needed for success in today’s world. Having key program components in place assists them in doing that,” said Anupma Prakash, UAF provost and executive vice chancellor. “And attaining Quality Matters exemplary program status reinforces to stakeholders — including students and parents — that we have those components in place and are committed to providing the highest quality online education and services for our learners.”

QM’s rigorous review process examines the components that students need to succeed in online learning, from aligned measurable course objectives to student and faculty support in learning and teaching online. The criteria are based on research-supported evidence, as well as knowledge gained from reviewing several thousand courses, from hundreds of institutions, over more than a decade. QM also reviews external comparisons and benchmarks to determine if program participants succeed at a high rate.

“Earning Quality Matters exemplary program status is an outstanding achievement that should be commended,” said Deb Adair, QM’s executive director. “In today’s competitive online learning landscape, it serves as a differentiator and highlights University of Alaska Fairbanks’ resolve to set students up for success — now and in the future.”

ADDITIONAL CONTACT: Grace Hall, Quality Matters senior manager of multimedia public relations, ghall@qualitymatters.org

ON THE WEB: Caitlyn Brice, a master’s degree candidate in UAF’s special education and teaching program, shares her experiences. (VIDEO)

Programs certified by Quality Matters

Other UAF rankings

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The Piper Super Cub is a nimble favorite of Alaska bush pilots who land on and take off from gravel bars and mountaintops. Engineers who designed the plane in the 1940s found a simple model that still works.

Another flying machine, the dragonfly, has not changed much in 300 million years, except it is no longer as large as a raven.

Humans have for a long time admired the design of this creature, one that can fly backward and zigzag with abrupt turns.

Aerospace scientists at the University of Colorado once leashed live dragonflies inside a wind tunnel. By observing smoke added to the wind, the researchers noticed the dragonflies twisted their wings on each downstroke. The smoke curled off the top of their wings, reducing air pressure there and providing more lift than is available to any aircraft with static wings.

A few years ago, scientists at Harvard, the University of Chicago and Columbia developed a mathematical model in an attempt to predict and duplicate the complex patterns within dragonfly wings.

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Each veined dragonfly wing, “a model of evolution and biological engineering,” is as unique as a human fingerprint, wrote Harvard Ph.D. student Jordan Hoffmann, a mathematician who likes to find order in systems that seem to have none. His team came pretty close to nature’s design.

Worldwide, there are about 3,000 species of dragonfly. Thirty types live in Alaska. The largest in the state is the lake darner, a cool blue dragonfly that turns dark when the air is chilly. The delicate treeline emerald flies around cold ponds north of the Brooks Range, miles farther north than any tree. The azure darner patrols the extreme northern coast of Alaska, just a few yards from sea ice and the Arctic Ocean.

The dragons of summer live as flying adults in Alaska for about two warm months. They can live much longer as larvae in bodies of water. After hatching from an egg and developing into an aquatic creature, the larvae use a spoonlike lower lip to capture small fish, tadpoles and other insects. Larvae then crawl above the water on the stems of aquatic vegetation, shed their larval skins, and pop their new wings out to dry.

Often pursuing moths, midges and mosquitoes from beneath, dragonflies succeed at catching their prey about 95 percent of the time. This is according to Harvard researchers who in 2011 documented dragonflies’ efficiency at capturing fruit flies.

Dragonflies have such a short time to shine here in Alaska because, like most insects, they need warm air temperatures for their body parts to perform. Biologists Pat Doak and Todd Sformo studied dragonflies on the UAF campus in Fairbanks. They found the adults started flying when the air temperature warmed to 57 degrees Fahrenheit.

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Forty-eight states have official insects. The dragonfly took the honor in both Alaska and Washington. Butterflies are the official insect of most other states.

Alaska school kids voted for a state insect during the 1993-1994 school year. The four-spotted skimmer dragonfly took first, over the second-place mosquito. Rep. Irene Nicholia, who sponsored the bill, explained.

“The dragonfly’s ability to hover and fly forward and backward reminds us of the skillful maneuvering of the bush pilots in Alaska,” she wrote.

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.

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The University Fire Department is planning training exercises at several Copper Lane houses this weekend, July 20-21.

The training activities may take place either Saturday or Sunday or both. Members of the public may see fire personnel and vehicles in the area. Some parts of the training will also include the use of nontoxic simulated smoke. No burning is planned.

The Copper Lane houses are located west of the Wood Center on the University of Alaska Fairbanks campus. The homes being used for this weekend’s training are scheduled for demolition this summer.

For more information, call 907-455-FIRE (3473).

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KUAC FM will be off the air for about a week, beginning the afternoon of July 30, to install a new transmitter and antenna on Ester Dome. The work will increase the public radio station’s reliability and on-air consistency. The original project start date of July 22 was postponed due to routine construction delays.

 “We would like to stress that taking KUAC FM off the air is necessary in order to complete the project and has nothing to do with the current state budget situation,” said Keith Martin, KUAC general manager.

During construction, listeners will be able to receive KUAC FM by livestreaming at KUAC.org on their computers, smartphones or tablets. They may also tune into KUAC TV 9.6, use the NPR app on their smartphones or tablets, or ask their smart speakers to play KUAC.

The equipment to be replaced is more than 23 years old and is beyond its life expectancy. The new equipment will make KUAC FM less susceptible to weather-related problems and power outages.

In addition to Fairbanks and areas nearby, the communities of Nenana, Delta Junction and Healy will be affected by the outage because their translators rebroadcast a signal from the transmitter on Ester Dome. Bettles, Eagle, Nome and Tok will still receive KUAC FM over the air, as their translators are fed via satellite.

Members of the public can find information throughout the construction by visiting KUAC.org and following KUAC on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. KUAC is a service of the University of Alaska Fairbanks.

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A new five-year, $11.8 million National Institutes of Health grant will help University of Alaska scientists translate their knowledge of hibernating animals into treatments that advance human health.

The University of Alaska Fairbanks Institute of Arctic Biology will lead the newly formed Center of Transformative Research in Metabolism. University of Alaska Anchorage researchers will also participate.

Hibernating animals, such as arctic ground squirrels and black bears, undergo unique changes in their metabolism — the processes that build and break down materials in living cells and provide them with energy. These changes allow the animals to survive long periods of reduced activity and body temperature with no health problems.

Understanding these adaptations could reveal ways to treat certain human health problems, such as atrophy in unused and aging muscles, obesity, type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular diseases.

The center will build on the university’s long history of research into northern animals that hibernate through Alaska’s winters.

“We’re going to understand the novel insights that they provide and be able to translate that into human applications,” said UAF professor Kelly Drew, who led the effort to obtain funding.

Knowing more about hibernating animals may point to new treatments for metabolic diseases in humans, according to IAB Director Brian Barnes, a UAF professor who has studied arctic ground squirrels for more than three decades.

“This is a big deal since it shows NIH’s recognition of hibernation as a deserving model for investment in biomedical research and UAF as a national and international center of expertise in hibernation and medical applications,” he said.

At UAF, the money initially will upgrade and maintain magnetic resonance imaging machines in the Murie and Reichardt buildings. It will also renovate part of the Robert G. White Large Animal Research Station on Yankovich Road to create a breeding colony of arctic ground squirrels.

Professor Trey Coker, who will lead the UAF research, already runs a lab that specializes in the study of problems related to human metabolism, such as obesity and muscle loss in aging adults. Hibernation research will enhance that work, Drew said.

At UAA, the grant will pay for equipment and technicians to advance research into microbial communities. Professor Khrys Duddleston, the UAA project leader, has been studying how gut microbes in arctic ground squirrels might help them maintain muscle mass during eight months in hibernation.

In total, the grant will support about 10 researchers, Drew said.

The UA effort is funded by the NIH’s Institutional Development Award program as a Center of Biomedical Research Excellence. The IDeA program’s COBRE grants support three five-year research phases. They are intended to build facilities and expertise in states that are working to grow their biomedical research infrastructure.

ADDITIONAL CONTACT: Kelly Drew, 907-474-7190, kdrew@alaska.edu

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University of Alaska Fairbanks researchers have linked specific chemical signatures found in human hair with a diet of traditional Yup’ik foods. The finding could help scientists make connections between diet and long-term health trends in Alaska Native populations.

The study was published this month in the Journal of Nutrition.

The researchers examined the diets of 68 residents in two Southwest Alaska coastal villages. Each resident participated in four extensive dietary interviews and provided hair samples. Scientists analyzed the samples at specific locations along each strand of hair for the ratio between different nitrogen isotopes, which is a potential chemical signal, or biomarker, of diet.

Researchers were able to strongly establish a connection between the biomarker and the consumption of traditional foods like fish and marine mammals. Changes in the biomarker along the hair strand also showed that traditional food intake peaked during the summer months.

The consumption of many traditional foods increases the presence of heavier nitrogen isotopes in the hair, because those isotopes are more abundant in animals that are higher in the food web, such as marine mammals and fish. Scientists have established that general relationship before, but the new results will allow them to more closely pinpoint the amount of traditional foods in a person’s diet, said senior author Diane O’Brien, a researcher at UAF’s Center for Alaska Native Health Research.

“This study lets us put a number on it – in other words, it lets us translate a biomarker measurement to a specific percent of the diet from traditional foods,” O’Brien said. “It seemed to be a very good reflection of all the traditional foods people were eating, even foods like berries and greens that do not have high nitrogen isotope ratios. This is likely because people who consume a lot of traditional foods tend to consume all of them, not just certain ones.”

These data are important to scientists because the consumption of traditional foods in Alaska Native diets has been associated with a reduced risk of chronic disease.

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Combining the use of biomarkers and surveys provides a more accurate way to measure what people are eating, allowing scientists to better make connections between diet and health. Using biomarkers is relatively cheap and easy, O’Brien said, and is a tool that doesn’t rely heavily on people’s recollections of their diets.

“Our diets are very complicated, and most of us don’t really don’t pay close attention to what we eat,” she said. “Because of that, there can be a lot of error in dietary data, making it hard to conclusively demonstrate links between diet and health. Having this biomarker gives us a lot more power to demonstrate how traditional foods relate to health in Alaska Native populations.”

The full Journal of Nutrition paper is available online at http://bit.ly/TraditionalBiomarkers. Along with O’Brien, authors of the paper include current and former CANHR and UAF researchers Kyungcheol Choy, Sarah Nash, Courtney Hill, Andrea Bersamin, Scarlett Hopkins and Bert Boyer.

The research was funded by the National Institutes of Health grants that established the Center for Alaska Native Health Research. The UAF Alaska Stable Isotope Facility conducted the biomarker analyses.

ADDITIONAL CONTACT: Diane O’Brien, dmobrien@alaska.edu.

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LeConte Glacier near Petersburg is the farthest-south glacier that spills into the sea on this side of the equator. Where that ice tongue dips into salty water, scientists recently measured melting much greater than predicted.

Scientists like working at LeConte because it’s just 25 miles from the fishing town and the ice has carved a few clifftops upon which glacier watchers can perch. They can also compare the 20-mile-long glacier to larger ones in Greenland and Antarctica that are dumping huge amounts of fresh water into the ocean.

A few generations of Petersburg High School students have taken helicopter and boat rides to LeConte Glacier as part of their science classes. Teacher Victor Trautman, who retired in June 2019, visited the glacier this May with six students.

Trautman was continuing the work of Paul Bowen, a teacher at Petersburg High School who began aiming surveying equipment at LeConte Glacier’s blue-white face in 1983.

In the mid 1990s, Bowen noticed the glacier’s sudden retreat of a mile after it had pretty much remained in the same place for more than 30 years.

That’s when glaciologists became interested in Bowen’s detailed reports and started their own monitoring of LeConte. Roman Motyka of UAF’s Geophysical Institute has been around for all of those professional studies. He was one of nine authors of a 2019 study in the journal Science. He and others documented their direct measurements of glacier ice turning to water beneath LeConte’s thunderous face.

David Sutherland of the University of Oregon is lead author of the new LeConte Glacier study. In August 2016 and May 2017, scientists bounced sound waves off the glacier front to create images of the underwater part of the glacier. They sampled the ocean water for temperature and salinity. They also recorded air temperature and precipitation and videoed the glacier’s behavior.

Sutherland is now on his way to Greenland to study glaciers flowing from the ice sheet into the ocean. The complicated logistics of that trip half a world away make him appreciate LeConte Glacier, which got its name in 1887 when U.S. Navy Adm. Charles Thomas surveyed the Alaska coast and honored his friend Joseph LeConte, a California biologist.

“It’s amazing to me that the environment (Alaskans) have in their backyard can be used as analogues for globally important processes,” Sutherland, an oceanographer, said as he prepared for his trip.

As it melts, LeConte Glacier is behaving like almost every other glacier in our warming world, contributing to sea-level rise that threatens coastal cities from Sri Lanka to Sweden.

In the recent study, Sutherland, Motyka and other scientists, including former Geophysical Institute graduate student and University of Alaska Southeast scientist Jason Amundson, showed underwater melting “up to two orders of magnitude greater than predicted by theory.”

The scientists hope their paper will guide others to make real measurements of ice loss where glaciers meet the sea, and will make predictions of sea-level rise more accurate.

As for LeConte Glacier, the body of ice that exists farther south than the city of Kodiak may now be losing much more ice than it is gaining through snowfalls in the high country.

“The warming of both the ocean and atmosphere may spark another rapid retreat,” Motyka said from his home in Juneau. “The entire Stikine Icefield (which feeds ice to LeConte and other glaciers) is thinning at a high rate.”

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.

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A team led by the University of Alaska Fairbanks has completed the country’s first FAA-approved true beyond-visual-line-of-sight domestic flight of an unmanned aircraft system under the small UAS rule.

The flight is a step toward gaining more routine Federal Aviation Administration approval of commercial beyond-visual-line-of-sight unmanned aircraft flights. Such approval could allow organizations to use unmanned aircraft to monitor pipelines and other infrastructure in Alaska and the rest of the United States.

Operators from the university’s Alaska Center for Unmanned Aircraft Systems Integration flew a Skyfront Perimeter long range hybrid-electric unmanned aircraft 3.87 miles along the pipeline corridor, starting at a location near the Chatanika River on the Elliott Highway.

During the flight, the team used onboard and ground-based detection systems, instead of human observers, to detect and avoid other aircraft in the airspace. Those included Iris Automation’s Casia, an onboard collision avoidance technology, and a 5-nautical-mile system consisting of eight ground-based Echodyne radars, which provided aviation radar coverage along the flight path. The detect-and-avoid systems prevent an unmanned aircraft from colliding with a manned aircraft. They will be key to the FAA approving the use of unmanned aircraft beyond the visual line of sight.

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“The ability to use UAVs for surveillance in remote areas of the pipeline increases the tools at our disposal to operate TAPS more reliably and safely and better protect Alaska’s environment. This innovative step forward will advance safe performance not just in our industry, but in multiple disciplines and workspaces across the country,” said Tom Barrett, president of Alyeska Pipeline Service Co., which operates the trans-Alaska pipeline system.

The flights were a part of the Unmanned Aircraft Systems Integration Pilot Program, a national initiative from the U.S. Department of Transportation and the White House. The IPP was created by a presidential memorandum to help integrate unmanned aircraft systems into the national airspace at or below 400 feet, and find ways to safely fly unmanned aircraft beyond visual line of sight, carry out night operations and operate over people. All of these are currently restricted under FAA regulations.

“The Integration Pilot Program is helping us advance the safe, secure and reliable integration of drones into the national airspace,” said FAA Acting Administrator Daniel K. Elwell. “This important milestone in Alaska gets us closer to that goal.”

Iris Automation CEO and co-founder Alexander Harmsen said, “This is the first time that detect-and-avoid technology is approved by an aviation authority as reliable enough to allow for BVLOS drone operations. We’re grateful for the FAA’s continued push to recognize and understand how these technologies will enable the successful and safe integration of UAS into our lives and businesses.”

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The Alaska IPP goals include enabling routine monitoring flights of both the trans-Alaska oil pipeline and Hilcorp Alaska’s Swanson River Oil Pipeline, and delivering medical supplies to remote areas. The partners also have an overall goal of enabling operations beyond the line of sight across Alaska 24 hours a day, all year long.

“The integration of unmanned aircraft into America’s skies just took another important step toward realization,” said Cathy Cahill, director of ACUASI, which is part of the UAF Geophysical Institute. “These first flights demonstrated that new technology can provide a route toward safe beyond-visual-line-of-sight operation of unmanned aircraft in Alaska. We want to ensure the safety of manned aviation while opening new opportunities for unmanned aircraft cargo deliveries to villages, monitoring of infrastructure, mammal surveys and a host of other missions of use to Alaskans.”

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Icelanders will soon install a plaque they hope people will read, long after those who bolted it to a mountain are dead.

Near a withering glacier, the sign reads: “Ok (Okjökull) is the first Icelandic glacier to lose its status as a glacier. In the next 200 years all our glaciers are expected to follow the same path. This monument is to acknowledge that we know what is happening and what needs to be done. Only you know if we did it.”

The designers of the plaque finished with this: “August 2019, 415 parts per million CO2,” referring to the highest level of carbon dioxide ever measured in the 30-mile cushion of gases that surrounds Earth.

“This is the story of our generation,” said glaciologist Guðfinna Aðalgeirsdóttir, a recent visitor to Alaska. “Do we do something? Can we do something?”

Aðalgeirsdóttir, known to her Alaska colleagues as Tolly, is a professor at the University of Iceland. In the late 1990s, while gathering data for her master’s degree with UAF’s Geophysical Institute, she tented up on Alaska’s Harding Icefield. She found that the ice mass on the Kenai Peninsula had lost the height of a five-story building to melting in the second half of the 20th century.

Tolly returned home to become a professor. She has since walked on ice all over the world. To honor her work in Antarctica, members of the U.K. Antarctic Place Names Committee recently named “Tolly Nunatak,” a summit of rock poking through an ice stream there.

Tolly was in Alaska this summer learning new software and writing proposals for future glacier work. She was also logging some volunteer time on a document that includes “the most important text I will ever write.”

She is one of the lead authors on a chapter of the next assessment report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a document handed to policymakers worldwide. Her former boss at the Danish Meteorological Institute in Copenhagen suggested Tolly volunteer for the duty.

After the first meeting with others tasked to write the report, Tolly returned to her hotel room and cried. Such a weighty responsibility on her shoulders, and she didn’t feel qualified, even though others decided she was.

“Finally, I thought, ‘Nobody can do it, but I just have to try,’” she said. “If in some sense I feel I can contribute, I need to do it.”

With 16 other experts from different countries, Tolly is writing about how the ocean is warming and expanding, and about the glaciers that are dumping so much water into the ocean. She and her partners will summarize what scientists have found regarding the frozen parts of the world — sea ice, ice sheets, glaciers, permafrost and snow, lake and river ice — and how all the ice on Earth will affect sea-level rise throughout the world.

Geophysical Institute glaciologist Regine Hock is also working on a special IPCC report on the ocean and Earth’s ice. It is due this September.

Tolly could not share what she is writing for the sixth assessment report, to be distributed to world leaders in April 2021. She said that while information is more solid than ever, the message from the fifth report in 2013 has not changed.

“The last report said that the changes were unequivocal and human-caused,” she said. “We are very certain that climate is changing, due to our emissions of greenhouse gases, with air temperatures increasing, storm frequencies increasing and (increased) melting of glaciers, snow and sea ice, along with permafrost thaw. Melt season is getting longer and temperature, salinity and pH of the oceans is increasing.

“The message is still alarming, and we should be pulling the emergency brake,” she said.

But where is the brake, and is the train already too far down the track? Tolly admits those are the most difficult questions.

“What does it take to change our behavior?” she said. “We talk about it a lot but very few are really doing anything. What is needed is a global movement towards noncarbon-emitting energy sources, like solar, wind and hydropower. Anything but fossil fuels.”

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.

Video: Guðfinna Aðalgeirsdóttir, also known as Tolly, a glaciologist and university professor from Iceland, recommends people watch Swedish high-school student Greta Thunberg’s presentation:

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While studying how trees take up snowmelt and rainwater, Jessie Young-Robertson noticed dramatic seasonal variations in the water content in the trees, particularly in deciduous trees like birch and aspen.

Most of her research was undertaken between March and September, but last year she extended her research through the winter —and made a surprising discovery.

Young-Robertson, a forest ecologist with the University of Alaska Fairbanks, said scientists believed that trees dried down immediately after losing their leaves. However, her sensors in birch trees showed, surprisingly, that the trees dumped 70 percent of their water content into the soil in a 24-hour period in late October. The water dump correlated closely with a drop in temperatures. It happened on one day in which temperatures were below zero.

She knew that trees dropped moisture in the fall. “The surprise was how much and how fast,” she said.

The finding could be significant because fall is a popular time to harvest firewood. Depending on when the trees are harvested in the fall, the wood could be very wet or much drier.

Further research is needed, but she believes that the information being collected may hold a key to reducing wintertime air pollution in Fairbanks caused by residents burning green firewood.

“You can let the trees do a lot of the work of drying the wood for you,” she said.

Young-Robertson has studied water uptake in plants for more than 10 years. As part of a National Science Foundation grant, she studied water uptake in several species of trees from March to September for three years. She discovered that deciduous trees have low water content during winter and early spring, become saturated when the snow melts, and lose 20 percent of their water content when they leaf out. Trees refilled their water supply through summer rainfall.

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She is trying to pinpoint the time when the moisture content is the lowest and the environmental factors that influence this. If people harvested firewood at the right time, she said, it would shorten the amount of time needed to season it and reduce the fine particulate emissions linked to burning wet wood.

The technology Young-Robertson used to measure the water content in trees has evolved since she started her research in the woods northeast of Fairbanks.

She used to walk or ski to her research plots in the watersheds of Caribou and Poker creeks, off the Steese Highway. She connected a sensor and her laptop to rods attached to the tree to measure its water content.  Sometimes electricity conducted by the tree shorted out her sensor, or bands measuring tree girth fell down when the trees shed water. The process is now automated and the devices she uses are more reliable.

Young-Robertson will continue to monitor plots in the research area, but will also establish and follow another plot this fall near Smith Lake. It will include birch, aspen and spruce, collecting data on air temperature, soil temperature, water content and tree girth.

One reason for placing the plot near UAF is that she hopes to stream the data to a website so people can track ongoing conditions and watch for the best time to harvest.

Young-Robertson, a researcher for the Agricultural and Forestry Experiment Station, will expand the project with additional grant money expected this fall. She hopes to increase the number of plots at the research watershed and to add a plot on Fort Wainwright so she can monitor trees in various conditions.

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She also hopes to conduct drying experiments with birch and spruce, the two most popular choices for firewood. The firewood would be harvested at different levels of moisture content. She will try to determine the difference in drying times needed to reduce the water content to 20 percent or lower, the standard required by the state and the Fairbanks North Star Borough.

Young-Robertson has many interests besides ecohydrology. She is an artist who paints with vivid acrylic colors and creates art with a digital drawing pad. She is interested in the connections between science and storytelling. She recorded a series of conversations with scientists and others as part of a collaboration with StoryCorps, which airs on National Public Radio. She also told a story about a disastrous solo hike on Kesugi Ridge as part of the Dark Winter Nights storytelling series. She hails originally from New Mexico, where her father worked as a research physicist.

She likes her work with trees and their mysteries. She discovered they conduct electricity when they’re full of water and even pick up radio stations. She could detect those signals with specialized sensors and convert them to sound.

“I feel like at every turn, we find something new,” she said.

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Birds that spent their summer next to muskoxen are now leaving Alaska to spend winter with zebras.

Northern wheatears are robin-size songbirds with tan bodies and handsome black eye bands. Wheatears are now gobbling insects in the rocky hills above Wales, Alaska. The birds will soon fly into the moist air just after sunset, maybe tonight, and cross the Bering Strait.

From Wales, the birds will travel the length of Russia and then Kazakhstan before crossing the Arabian Desert and then the Red Sea. The trip of 9,000 miles — perhaps the longest migration of any songbird — will take three months, until the birds stop for the winter months in eastern Africa: Sudan, Uganda or Kenya.

Franz Bairlein is a German biologist and director of the Institute of Avian Research in Wilhelmshaven who helped discover the wheatear’s migration route. In June 2009, his team members captured 30 of the birds at Eagle Summit north of Fairbanks. They fitted them with backpack geolocators, lightweight devices that record the time and whether it is light or dark outside.

The next summer, the scientists recaptured three of the birds at Eagle Summit and retrieved the geolocators. From the information recorded on the tiny devices, they teased out the wheatears’ incredible journey from Alaska to Africa, and then back again the next spring.

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At the same time, the scientists performed an identical experiment with another population of northern wheatears that spends summers on Baffin Island in Arctic Canada. The one bird whose geolocator they were able to recover on Baffin Island spent its winter in Mauritania, in western Africa. That bird traveled southeast on its fall journey to Africa, starting its trip with a 2,000-mile Atlantic Ocean crossing, from Baffin Island to the British Isles.

The Alaska and Baffin Island populations of wheatears probably never meet, either on the tundra or on the savanna. The scientists determined this by examining their feathers using isotope analysis, to determine the water sources from which the birds drank.

Scientists don’t know for sure how the two groups of wheatears developed those parallel life strategies on different halves of the globe. Bairlein said that during the last great glacial period, in which much of the far north was ice-covered, wheatears may have been holed up in the Middle East. When the glaciers shrank from the continents, one group of wheatears may have expanded to the northeast, reaching Alaska, while the other drifted northwest, reaching Canada via Europe and Greenland. Somehow, they lost touch.

Another German scientist in 2010 studied the wheatears now staging in Wales, Alaska. Heiko Schmaljohann, also of the Institute of Avian Research, attracted Wales wheatears to electronic scales holding plastic dishes full of mealworms. When a bird landed, he and his helpers looked through a spotting scope to record its weight. The scientists wanted to find how fueled-up the birds were before they headed out over the Bering Strait.

Schmaljohann captured more than 100 wheatears — all of them new birds that hatched that summer — and fitted many with radio transmitters. He found that most birds took off just after midnight on August nights, and almost all in a southwest direction from Wales.

How do birds that pecked from eggshells on Alaska tundra just this summer know how to make it to Africa? The birds are born with that knowledge, maybe tied to the Earth’s magnetic field and geographic landforms.

Why do wheatears and other migrating birds wait until night to fly? That’s a tough one to answer, but researchers think the cover of darkness might protect birds from predators. Cooler temperatures and more stable flying conditions might also exist at night, and, if birds land during daylight, insects are easier to find.

The northern wheatears that knife into the wind at Wales and leave Alaska will not reach Africa until November. After four months in the sub-Sahara with giraffes, they will again feel the urge and hop from an acacia tree branch. Their return trip to Alaska in 2020 via the same route will be several weeks faster than their fall journey. The nomads will then raise new wheatears with the help of Alaska’s most abundant natural resource, bugs.

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.

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Sixteen rural Alaska high school students will head into their senior year this fall with four years of geological fieldwork under their belts thanks to participation in the University of Alaska Fairbanks’ GeoFORCE Alaska program. Another six students in the program will begin their college careers with the same solid foundation.

The students graduated from the four-year program in late July. This was the second class to graduate from the GeoFORCE Alaska program.

GeoFORCE Alaska seeks to increase the number and diversity of rural and minority Alaskans pursuing careers in science and technical fields, especially geology. During each of the four summers following eighth grade, GeoFORCE students join 10-day field expeditions throughout the United States, including Alaska. The expeditions introduce students to new environments and provide college-level instruction in geology.

“We get them interested in the sciences by taking them on these field experiences,” said GeoFORCE coordinator Brian Reggiani. “We’re inspiring them and providing support as they move from high school on into success — however they define that for themselves.”

Student hometowns include Point Lay, Utqiaġvik, Anaktuvuk Pass, Nuiqsut, Noatak, Kivalina and Kotzebue. The free program is entirely funded through donations. Many sponsors represent Alaska industries that rely on the state’s natural resources. A principal goal of the program is to diversify Alaska’s technical workforce.

“We want to make sure rural students are well represented in that workforce because they bring a really important perspective,” said Sarah Fowell, a UAF geology professor and GeoFORCE Alaska’s director. “There’s a balance that Alaska faces all the time, which is managing cultural resources and our natural resources, and the students from these rural villages are uniquely placed to inform that balance.”

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The students’ final geologic expedition began in Dinosaur National Monument in Utah and ended at Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming. During the past four years, the students visited more than 45 sites throughout Alaska and the Lower 48.

UAF’s College of Natural Science and Mathematics hosts the program, which is modeled after GeoFORCE Texas. The program helps students build life skills and gain confidence as they encounter unfamiliar environments.

“At GeoFORCE, we are particularly interested in making sure these students come back from year to year, so they build an active group of friends that they can communicate with, network with, and keep each other accountable. We are really building friendships that last a lifetime,” said Reggiani.

To student Amyaa Edwards-Davis, the camaraderie built up over the past four years has been especially enjoyable. The combination of travel and science has contributed to her own personal development, she added.

“It makes you expand your horizons,” she said. “It pushes you out of your comfort zones and makes you a better person.”

ADDITIONAL CONTACT: Brian Reggiani, GeoFORCE program coordinator, 907-474-5313, breggiani@alaska.edu

ON THE WEB: www.geoforce.alaska.edu

NOTE TO EDITORS: Photos are available for download at http://bit.ly/0814191.

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Peter Webley’s passion for innovation, mentoring and outreach has earned him recognition from a national organization.

The National Academy of Inventors named Webley to its spring 2019 class of senior members.

Senior members are active faculty, scientists and administrators from NAI member institutions who have demonstrated remarkable innovation-producing technologies capable of changing society. They also have proven success in patents, licensing and commercialization.

“My passion is to work with new opportunities, either cultural, societal, or technological, that can have an impact on society,” Webley said. “In working on the transfer of knowledge from a university environment into the community and commercial sector, I can build capacity to better the lives of people and the world around us.”

Webley is a faculty ambassador in UAF’s Office of Intellectual Property and Commercialization, research associate professor at the UAF Geophysical Institute and associate director of research at the Alaska Center for Unmanned Aircraft Systems Integration.

“Peter is a geoscientist, innovator and entrepreneur,” said UAF Vice Chancellor for Research Larry Hinzman. “He has a passion to train and mentor the next generation of inventors and entrepreneurs and is connected to the wider Fairbanks entrepreneurial community and statewide innovation ecosystem.

Webley is among 54 academic inventors named NAI senior members this spring. The class represents 32 research universities and government and nonprofit research institutes. They are inventors named on over 860 U.S. patents.

“NAI member institutions support some of the most elite innovators on the horizon. With the NAI senior member award distinction, we are recognizing innovators that are rising stars in their fields,” said Paul R. Sanberg, NAI president. “This new class is joining a prolific group of academic visionaries already defining tomorrow.”

Senior members are elected biannually, and nominations are accepted on a rolling basis. A full list of NAI senior members is available on the NAI website.

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Alaska had been a state for one year in 1960 when its Department of Fish and Game conducted a wolf-planting experiment on Coronation Island in Southeast Alaska. At the time, the remote 45-square-mile island exposed to the open Pacific had a high density of blacktailed deer and no wolves. That summer, biologists from Fish and Game released two pairs of wolves on the island.

The experiment was the only wolf-stocking effort undertaken in Alaska and probably worldwide at that time, said Dave Klein, a professor emeritus with the University of Alaska Fairbanks’ Institute of Arctic Biology. Klein, who had studied deer on the island for his Ph.D. thesis, helped the state make the decision to transplant wolves on Coronation Island.

“Alaska had just become a state, and you had a brand-new Department of Fish and Game staffed with young biologists who wanted to do things based on biology rather than a mix of politics and science. It’d be much more difficult to do it now,” he said.

Fish and Game biologists released two male and two female wolves at Egg Harbor on Coronation Island. Before they left, the researchers shot five deer to provide food for the wolves.

Biologist Paul Garceau visited the island the next May and found tracks, deer remains and wolf scats containing deer hair and bones, showing that the wolves had adapted to life on the island.

Two months later, a commercial fisherman shot the two adult female wolves, but Garceau saw tracks of wolf pups on the island when he returned later that summer, indicating that the females had given birth before they died, and the pups had survived.

In 1964, Alaska Department of Fish and Game biologist Harry Merriam explored the island for eight days and saw 11 adult wolves and the tracks of two pups. He estimated that at least 13 wolves lived on the island and three litters of young had been born since the first wolves had arrived.

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The following summer, in 1965, Merriam spent 10 days on the island, seeing wolf tracks on all the beaches. He saw no sign of deer on the north side of the island, but found deer tracks on the steep slopes of the island’s south side, where rough terrain and dense brush may have provided the best chance for deer to escape wolves.

In February 1966, Merriam saw only three wolves on the island, and their tracks suggested they were the only wolves left. He examined more than 100 wolf scats; six of those contained wolf remains only, suggesting the animals had resorted to cannibalism. Deer remains in the scats were less than one half of the previous spring; fragments of birds, seals, sea creatures and small mammals constituted the rest.

In August 1966, Merriam and his partners collected seven wolf scats, compared to 201 one year before. They found just three sets of fresh deer tracks.

By 1968, one wolf remained on the island. Biologists who inventoried the island’s animals in 1983 found no evidence of wolves, but the deer were once again plentiful.

Alaska’s only wolf-stocking experiment taught biologists the importance of habitat size (they concluded that a 45-square mile island was too small for both deer and wolves). The study also showed how many factors play into the dynamics of a wild animal population, which is a point Klein said many people miss in arguments about wolf control.

“The relationship between wolves and their prey is very complex,” he said. “Sometimes wolves are the key predators of caribou or moose, sometimes bears. Sometimes severe weather is the main factor, sometimes food availability.

“The main problem with these kinds of controversies is people are unwilling to look at the complexity of the ecosystems involved. Things are not simple in nature.”

Klein, with writer and researcher Karen Brewster, recently finished “The Making of an Ecologist: My Career in Alaska Wildlife Management and Conservation.” The book is now available through the University of Alaska Press.

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 2004.

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It’s a brilliant July Fourth morning outside of Juneau, and I’m bagging barnacles.

Armed with a paint scraper, tongs and a foam board to kneel on, I meticulously remove every bit of biomass from inside a ¼-by-¼-meter square of PVC pipe dropped onto a rocky section of beach near the mouth of Cowee Creek. I yank Fucus seaweed by the handful, massage blue mussels out by the roots and scrape off the barnacles, which I discover have innards like egg yolks. Everything goes into Ziploc bags, 10 in all. As I work my way down toward sand and bedrock, a seemingly endless supply of tiny snails materializes within the squares, one by one.

“I can’t believe how many snails there are here,” I comment.

“Yeah,” laughs Sydney King, a UAF College of Fisheries and Ocean Sciences technician who is scribbling down notes while examining a PVC square of her own. “Well, I have to count them.”

King and I are spending Independence Day hunkered on this remote stretch of shoreline as part of a much larger mission: to contribute to a running record of physical, biological and chemical conditions in the coastal Gulf of Alaska and the watersheds that feed it. It’s part of Fire and Ice, a five-year project by the Alaska National Science Foundation Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research. The project is studying how climate change could impact marine life along the coastline.

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“The goal of the Coastal Margins part of the Fire and Ice project is to understand how changes in freshwater are affecting downstream ecosystems,” explained Anne Beaudreau, an associate professor of fisheries at CFOS and co-lead of the coastal portion of Fire and Ice, during an interview outside her Juneau office. “We’re studying areas that are undergoing rapid change — there are changes in precipitation, glaciers are melting — and all that freshwater is moving downstream into the marine environment and affecting habitats and species there.”

The site at which we’re working, Cowee Creek, is one of 10 watersheds that are being sampled at monthly intervals, five of them along the Juneau road system and the other five in Kachemak Bay. Each watershed has a different level of glacial cover, from 63 percent on the Mendenhall River down to zero percent at a pair of other sites.

Part of the idea behind the project is to substitute space for time: to see how conditions vary based on levels of glaciation and to extrapolate those changes into a world with less glacial cover. “We expect that in the future, the areas that are currently covered by ice are going to start to look more and more like rain-fed systems,” Beaudreau said. “And so we hope that studying how the biology is changing across the gradient will give us a bit of a window into the future.”

The bags of snails and barnacles are bound for a freezer at the CFOS Lena Point facility and will ultimately head to a laboratory for analysis. King’s only products are data: She’s examining small plots of the intertidal zone and recording the surface composition and amounts of sea life. Meanwhile, a quarter-mile away, Beaudreau takes notes from a skiff as students and other volunteers haul a seine along a lonely stretch of beach. They lug the net on shore and examine the wriggling contents, which include a soggy mess of seaweed, the occasional starry flounder or salmon, and piles and piles of staghorn sculpin. Each fish is measured, logged and released back into the ocean. They’ve been at this for five days and five different sites, and will do it again in a month, and again a month after that, and each summer month for the next five years.

The ecological research is generating only a fraction of the data being gathered. Oceanic sensors, ocean drifters, plankton tows and remote sensing add to the team’s knowledge of local conditions over time. In addition to the nearshore work, “stream teams” in both Juneau and Kachemak Bay are studying water characteristics in the streams that feed the estuaries and working to link their findings to data from the coastline. Laboratory experiments and modeling will help scale up the local measurements to a broader region. In an upcoming phase of the ambitious project, the team will also interview resource users to understand how local knowledge and stewardship can help coastal communities adapt to environmental change.

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In addition to the Coastal Margins research, another team of researchers in the $20 million Fire and Ice project is examining climate-induced changes to fire regimes in the boreal forest.

The project also incorporates educational research and a variety of outreach efforts across the state. It is funded by the National Science Foundation and the state of Alaska. For more information, visit www.alaska.edu/epscor.

Tom Moran is the communications manager for Alaska NSF EPSCoR.