One fall day in Interior Alaska, a lion stalked a ground squirrel that stood at attention on a hillside. The squirrel noticed bending blades of grass, squeaked an alarm call, and then dived into its hole. It curled up in a grassy nest. A few hours later, for reasons unknown, its heart stopped.

Twenty-thousand years later, Ben Gaglioti teased apart the mummified ground squirrel’s cache in an attempt to better reconstruct what Alaska was like during the days of the mammoth, bison, wild horse and camel.

Gaglioti was then a University of Alaska Fairbanks graduate student, using tools ranging from tweezers to an isotope-analyzing device in his attempt to sift Alaska’s distant past from the midden of a ground squirrel that perished during the last ice age. At that time, from about 14,000 to 45,000 years ago, North America looked much different than it does today.

For one thing, blue ice one mile thick was pressing down on Toronto and Chicago. Massive sheets covered much of the continent, but northern Alaska was a grassland, part of what UAF scientist Dale Guthrie named the “Mammoth Steppe.”

The Mammoth Steppe blanketed the top of the globe from about France to Whitehorse. It was cold and dry, and featured grasses and sedges. So rich were the feeding grounds that the ancestors of today’s animals were jumbo versions.

“Sheep, bison, caribou and other ruminants on the Mammoth Steppe were giants,” Guthrie wrote in “Frozen Fauna of the Mammoth Steppe.”

Not many ground squirrels live in Interior Alaska today, probably because the current landscape of tundra and boreal forest plants doesn’t provide them enough nutrition. But the squirrels were here during the ice age. A few of them died within their dens, and, through a rare process of being buried and then frozen, became mummified.

While blasting hillsides of frozen soil with water to reach the gold-bearing gravels beneath, miners in Interior Alaska often found remains of ice-age mammals, including a mummified bison that Guthrie extracted. Miners sometimes told scientists of their discoveries, and researchers, often UAF’s Otto Geist, would sometimes recover the bones of mammoths and other remains of ancient animals.

Geist and other scientists recovered more than a dozen ancient ground squirrel nests from Alaska and the Yukon Territory; they sent many of the nests and caches, and sometimes the mummified squirrels, to the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. Other researchers dated the remains and found the squirrels had lived from about 40,000 years ago to about 8,000 years ago.

Gaglioti, the UAF graduate student who went on to postdoctoral work at Columbia University, picked the seeds and leaves from the ancient squirrel middens and identified what plants were here during the last ice age. He found plants that are still in Alaska, as well as grasses that grow today on the Great Plains of the U.S. and Canada.

To compare the diets of Mammoth Steppe squirrels to living ground squirrels, Gaglioti also traveled to the North Slope and dug up several ground squirrel caches, finding that those squirrels seem to prefer certain berries and willow leaves.

“We’re trying to understand the nature of the Mammoth Steppe — the habitats here before the extinction of the large mammals and the arrival of humans into North America,” he said. “As things are changing — like if it’s getting dryer and warmer in modern-day Alaska — we might be able to draw on these details from the past to better understand climate and vegetation relationships in Alaska.”

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 2010.

Mariculture in Alaska centers mainly around oysters. Kelp, blue mussels and geoduck clams are also farmed, but in much smaller quantities. Many Alaskans, including members of the governor’s mariculture taskforce, want to boost this fledgling industry to diversify the state’s oil-dependent economy, and researchers are trying to help develop alternative species for ocean farmers.

One of the species being examined is the weathervane scallop, also known as the giant Pacific scallop or Patinopecten caurinus.

Prized by five-star chefs and seafood connoisseurs, weathervanes are a bit of a mystery animal. Major gaps exist in our understanding of the tasty mollusks, which are native to Alaska. In scientific literature, weathervanes are described as one of the most “data-poor” fisheries in Alaska, despite more than four decades of commercial harvesting.

“We as a scientific community know very little about weathervane scallops” said Diana Perry, who recently completed her one-year Alaska Sea Grant State Fellowship, working at NOAA Fisheries in Juneau.

Kevin McNeel, a fishery biologist with the Alaska Department of Fish and Game, said scientists have basic unanswered questions including how to properly determine the age of a weathervane, how fast they grow, and how abundant they are in Alaska waters.

“We also have a lot of questions about when the scallops spawn. Do they spawn multiple times a year?”

Answers to such questions would help better inform ecosystem management of weathervanes, which fall under both federal and state oversight.

The commercial fleet that harvests weathervanes in Alaska is also small. A handful of vessels based in Kodiak dredge them from beds located between 50 and 100 meters below the ocean surface. Other than the area around Kodiak Island, weathervane beds are located southeast of Prince William Sound in Yakutat Bay, in areas along the Alaska Peninsula and Aleutian Islands, and in the Bering Sea, according to Gordon Kruse, a fisheries professor emeritus at the University of Alaska Fairbanks College of Fisheries and Ocean Sciences.

Despite the small size of the fleet, the scallops are a delicacy in high demand. Driven by strong state and federal interest in increasing U.S. mariculture, Perry’s assignment was to take a deep dive into the world of weathervane biology to advance the science.

Working at the NOAA Fisheries building at Lena Point in Juneau and under the supervision of fisheries biologist Kristin Cieciel, Perry piloted a research project on weathervane reproduction and population structure, attempting to spawn the large scallops in tanks and then grow them in fresh seawater. One of the goals was to create protocols for future weathervane and pink scallop hatcheries.

“I’ve been working with the Alaska Department of Fish and Game to do, among other things, a growth-rate study, because at this point we don’t even know at what rate they grow. We wanted to find out whether weathervanes, or scallops in general, have the potential to bring aquaculture diversity for people who have farms in Alaska,” said Perry. “It’s still a work in progress.”

Besides measuring their growth and getting the weathervanes to spawn, Perry also studied the development of their gonads using the science of microanatomy.

The project was intriguing but not easy. Weathervanes are “testy and notoriously hard to work with,” Perry said.

“We’re still trying to get them to spawn in the lab. We haven’t gotten to the growing-out phase but we hope to get there soon. We don’t have a nursery for them, but in theory once we get to that phase we will be able to spawn them and get them to grow,” she said.

Although Perry’s fellowship is over and she has left the state to pursue doctoral studies at the University of Florida, another researcher is continuing the work. And Cieciel, Perry’s former supervisor, says the genetics methods Perry developed are being applied to other shellfish.

“We’re dipping our toes into abalone and oysters,” Cieciel said.

Margo Reveil, owner of Jakolof Bay Oyster Co. and president of the Alaska Shellfish Growers Association, would like to see weathervanes become a part of her mariculture business. But numerous obstacles must be overcome first, she said.

Unlike oysters, scallops are generally shucked and only the meat—the adductor muscle—is sold. That extra processing can mean higher labor and equipment costs. Scallops also have a much shorter shelf life than oysters.

“Once you harvest them, they have to go to market immediately,” Reveil said. “They don’t survive being out of the water long. You have three to five days to sell them fresh or you have to freeze.”

Despite the challenges, Reveil hopes weathervanes will eventually be farmed in Alaska waters. She’s experimented with growing kelp and mussels, and would love to have another bivalve among her products.

“We’re always trying to diversify our farm.”

Nome, August 2019: More than 2 inches of rain falls in one day, setting a new record.

Thompson Pass, December 2017: 1.7 inches of snow piles up in 10 minutes. Seven feet of new powder blankets the pass in the next three days.

Ketchikan, December 2013: 23 inches of rain falls in five days.

These Alaska weather events were each the result of a great firehose in the sky that reaches from near the tropics to the far North. Meteorologists call it an atmospheric river.

Scientists have long noted these flood-causing/wildfire-relieving “long, narrow plumes of enhanced atmospheric water vapor.” If you were to study weather maps of the entire Earth today, you would see about 11 atmospheric rivers.

Marty Ralph of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in California, an expert on atmospheric rivers, described them as drought busters in his state. He also found atmospheric rivers were responsible for seven of eight flood events he studied on California’s Russian River.

When set up and propelled by other weather patterns, water vapor from near the equator flows in wide ribbons hundreds of miles long above our heads. If you sliced a theoretical cross-section from an atmospheric river, it would carry almost three times as much water, in vapor form, as what spills from the mouth of the Amazon River, Ralph said.

Some of that airborne water does not fall out as rain or snow. But when the super-wet air mass meets mountains or hills, a lot pours out.

The emptying of an atmospheric river on land can be good or bad if you occupy the ground beneath it. The atmospheric river that flooded Nome streets in early August shifted into Interior Alaska and the Alaska Range. Several inches of rain put the damper on many fires, including the Hess Creek Fire south of the Yukon River. After a lightning strike sparked it on June 21, that fire had consumed spruce and muskeg over a swath the size of New York City.

Alaska is in the crosshairs of several atmospheric rivers each season, including a type that would be welcome now, during the extended wildfire season on the Kenai Peninsula.

“The northeast Gulf Coast and Southcentral can get hammered by an atmospheric river when south flow originating near Hawaii creates the Pineapple Express that persists for days,” said Ed Plumb, warning coordination meteorologist for the National Weather Service’s Fairbanks office.

Aaron Jacobs, a hydrologist with the National Weather Service in Juneau, said researchers are studying whether atmospheric rivers are becoming more common in Alaska.

NASA scientists in 2018 said atmospheric rivers in our changing climate might become less frequent worldwide, but more intense. Duane Waliser of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena predicted 10 percent fewer atmospheric rivers by the end of the 21st century, but said the remaining ones would be about 25 percent wider and longer. That means people would experience even more atmospheric-river conditions: Heavy rain and the wet winds that come with them.

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 has announced the winners of the 2019 Emil Usibelli Distinguished Teaching, Service and Research Awards.

The Distinguished Teaching Award will go to Charles Mason, a photography professor and chair of the Department of Communication and Journalism. The Distinguished Research Award will be presented to Katey Walter Anthony, a research professor at UAF’s Water and Environmental Research Center. Michael West, research professor and director of the Alaska Earthquake Center, will receive the Distinguished Service Award.

Mason has taught photography and photojournalism at UAF since 1990, and has spent more than 10 years as department chair during that time. He previously worked as a staff photographer at the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner, and his award-winning photos have appeared in art shows and numerous major publications.

Students who nominated Mason praised his humor, patience and willingness to challenge them academically. His time at UAF has spanned the shift from film to digital photography, and he has even developed a recent expertise in making photos with a wet-plate technique from the 1800s. His students have gone on to a variety of related careers, including photojournalism, commercial photography and filmmaking.

“It’s professors like Charles Mason that propel students beyond ‘the default,’” wrote his former student Ben Grossmann, a 1995 UAF alumnus, in a nomination letter. “He challenges his students to do great work, and he reminds them they have everything they need to be the best in the world, and motivates them to be whatever they want in life.”

Mason earned a bachelor’s degree in natural science and mathematics from Washington and Lee University, and a master’s degree in documentary photography from Illinois State University.

Walter Anthony joined UAF’s Institute of Northern Engineering in 2007 and has established a strong research program focused on the effects of degrading permafrost on climate change. Her efforts have raised awareness of the self-perpetuating cycle of permafrost-released methane, which is a powerful greenhouse gas.

Walter Anthony is recognized as an expert on the subject through both professional journals and popular media articles. She and her research group have established a program to monitor methane bubbling from northern lakes with the help of scientists, teachers, citizens and satellites. Her popular YouTube videos that show methane gas being ignited from icy lake bubbles have helped illustrate the issue to a broader audience.

Matthew Wooller, the UAF Alaska Stable Isotope Facility’s director, said Walter Anthony has raised the profile of a critical subject.

“Dr. Walter Anthony has established herself and her group as a world leader in the research area of methane-related biogeochemistry, an area that will be increasingly in demand in light of ongoing environmental changes in the Arctic,” Wooller wrote in his nomination letter.

Walter Anthony earned a bachelor’s degree in geology from Mount Holyoke College, a master’s degree in ecology from University of California, Davis, and a Ph.D. in biology from UAF.

West has worked at UAF’s Geophysical Institute since 2004 and has served as Alaska state seismologist since 2012. He directs the Alaska Earthquake Center and leads its mission to reduce Alaska’s vulnerability to earthquakes through monitoring, research and public engagement.

West has promoted Alaska’s earthquake research needs at the national level and has advocated for several congressional bills related to natural hazards. Through his efforts, the center has improved and expanded monitoring of Alaska’s earthquakes, which occur throughout the state at an average rate of once every 10 minutes. West coordinates a strong team at the center and has emphasized providing reliable and engaging information to the public, media and policymakers.

“He has built up a reservoir of trust and goodwill, and become a true leader in the state of Alaska on the issue of earthquakes,” wrote Jeff Freymueller, a Michigan State University professor and former UAF colleague, in his nomination letter.

West earned a bachelor’s degree in physics from Colorado College, and master’s and doctoral degrees from Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University.

The Usibelli Awards are among the university’s most prestigious awards. They are funded annually from an endowment of more than $750,000 that Usibelli Coal Mine established in 1992.

Each year, a committee that includes members from the faculty, the student body and the UA Foundation board evaluates the nominees. Each winner receives a cash award of $10,000.

The University of Alaska Fairbanks has received a five-year, $19.6 million National Institutes of Health grant to build capacity and increase diversity of students in biomedical research.

The new grant builds interdisciplinary collaborations following a One Health approach, which investigates the health of people, animals and their shared environment in Alaska.

The research, led by Brian Barnes, director of UAF’s Institute of Arctic Biology, is funded through the NIH’s National Institute of General Medical Sciences. The grant renews an earlier Institutional Development Award called the IDeA Networks of Biomedical Research Excellence, or INBRE. Other leaders include Jason Burkhead and Cindy Knall of the University of Alaska Anchorage, and Julie Benson, INBRE Alaska program administrator.

Alaska INBRE, which was first established in 2001, is a statewide collaborative network led by UAF. Other INBRE partners include UAA, University of Alaska Southeast, Southcentral Foundation and the Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium.

The new grant will fund the study of health disparities in Alaska Native people. One Health has been the theme of Alaska INBRE research since 2014, supporting studies on topics such as the spread of tick-borne pathogens, infections among migrating salmon, and the dangers of avian influenza to hunters.

The latest award will fund training and services in genetic studies, support and training of graduate students, and research experiences for UA undergraduates.

Alaska INBRE focuses on increasing the competitiveness of faculty and investigators for winning their own, independent grants from the NIH. It also provides support for pilot research projects, research advisors and professional growth. Along with those goals, it will implement a new program that provides support to postdoctoral scientists and technical staff. It will also pay for specialized equipment to increase retention of successful investigators in Alaska.

“Alaska INBRE has had a significant impact on the ability of students and faculty to do biomedical and health research that is directly relevant to Alaskans and their families and communities,” Barnes said. “It is building a network of researchers among the UA campuses and the tribally-led institutions of Southcentral Foundation and the Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium to strengthen well-being throughout our state.”

Alaska INBRE is supported by an Institutional Development Award from the National Institution of General Medical Sciences of the NIH, No. 2P20GM103395. The content of this release is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the NIH.

Aurora-watchers gazing at spectacular displays over the Labor Day weekend may have been seeing more than the northern lights. They may have been dazzled by STEVE as well.

STEVE is short for the Strong Thermal Emissions Velocity Enhancement, a celestial phenomenon auroral researchers, citizen-scientists and photography enthusiasts first introduced to the world in 2016.

STEVE’s narrow ribbon of light, to the naked eye, looks strikingly similar to aurora. However, there are distinct differences. First, its pinkish mauve color is not aurora-like. In addition, the phenomenon is often associated with “picket fence” emissions, which look like green columns of light passing through the ribbons at lower altitudes. Lastly, STEVE appears in areas farther south than auroral lights typically do.

Scientists thought something didn’t add up.

This summer, researchers confirmed that STEVE is not aurora, but is instead a unique phenomenon. Their findings were published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.

“The big thing is, we can clearly say now it’s not regular aurora,” said University of Alaska Fairbanks researcher Don Hampton, a co-author on the paper. “It’s a new phenomenon, that’s pretty exciting.”

The project, led by University of Calgary researcher D.M. Gillies, used a spectrograph to examine the light from the phenomenon and identify what kind of emissions it gives and in what patterns and wavelengths. Hampton and his colleagues designed and built the spectrograph at the UAF Geophysical Institute.

“We need to understand what the spectrum looks like and therefore understand the physics behind it,” Hampton said. A spectrum acts as a definitive identification, like a DNA test or chemical formula for light.

When the scientists looked at STEVE’s spectrum they saw something unique. Aurora has individual wavelengths and acts like a neon sign. In aurora, electrons from our magnetosphere fly down, bumping into atoms and molecules in our atmosphere, which excites them. Once the excited particles relax they emit photons, which can be seen as specific wavelengths of light. Depending on which colors you see, you know certain lights came from a nitrogen molecule and others came from oxygen.

“When we looked at the spectrum of STEVE, it had none of those distinct wavelengths,” Hampton said. “Instead, it’s a very broad band of light. So all wavelengths are basically equally as strong.”

This means that the light is not coming from atoms and molecules colliding in the atmosphere but from something very warm — maybe thousands of degrees warm.

“When you turn your electric stove on, those coils get red hot, right? If you look at it with a spectrograph, you would see broadband emissions,” Hampton said. “So this is like very, very warm atmosphere emissions of some sort.”

The research also concluded that the picket fence emissions are similar to a typical aurora structure. These are caused by the same kinds of particle precipitation usually seen with aurora.

Like auroras, STEVE’s appearances vary greatly, showing up anywhere from weeks to months apart.

Scientists have studied the hot particles associated with STEVE since the 1970s. However, they did not realize until recently that they produced a visible feature.

Confirming the existence of a celestial phenomenon is exciting, Hampton said. The next, and more difficult step, is finding out what causes it and how it affects us.

Any disturbance to our upper atmosphere, like aurora, can affect radio communications between Earth and spacecraft. STEVE is especially interesting because it is a large local energy input, but clearly not normal aurora.

“As a new phenomenon we want to understand not just why and how it is created, but also how does it affect our infrastructure,” Hampton said. “We don’t expect that if we understand how STEVE is created that we will cure cancer, or produce warp drive (though one never knows), but we do want to understand how one bit of the ionosphere works, and that may help overall knowledge as well as provide some practical understanding to reduce the impact on other aspects of our daily life.”

ON THE WEB: For additional explanation of the phenomenon, watch this video from NASA: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wRHwGD-is9U

The University of Alaska Museum of the North is looking for volunteers for its family programs this semester.

Participants work with museum educators during Family Days and other special events, and help visitors connect with collections and participate in hands-on activities about science, history, culture and art.

This is a great opportunity to learn more about the museum’s resources and gain experience in educational outreach. No experience is needed. The first Family Day of the semester will be from noon to 4 p.m. Sept. 14.

For more information, email ua-museumlearn@alaska.edu or call 907-474-5140.

An Oregon test site for unmanned aircraft systems has joined the Pan-Pacific UAS Test Range Complex, also known as the Alaska UAS Test Site, operated by the University of Alaska Fairbanks.

Northwest UAV, based in McMinnville, Oregon, began inaugural flights in September 2019 as part of the Pan-Pacific UAS Test Range Complex.

UAF’s Alaska Center for Unmanned Aircraft Systems Integration operates the complex, one of seven U.S. unmanned aircraft test sites approved by the Federal Aviation Administration. It has partners in Oregon, Hawaii, Kansas and Mississippi.

Northwest UAV’s flight facility in McMinnville lets users develop their UAVs from the design phase through flight testing. Resources include a ground and flight test range, as well as an on-site dedicated machine shop; a 3D printing operation; aeronautical, mechanical and electrical engineering services; wire harness production and other services. Northwest UAV’s facility also includes up to 15,000 square feet of space dedicated for on-site customer use.

Through UAF, Northwest UAV has been granted permission to operate its own range. Its aircraft will be allowed to fly up to 4,000 feet high in a 5-nautical-mile radius of the facility. McMinnville is about 30 miles southwest of Portland.

“It’s about efficiency and quality,” said Chris Harris, president and owner of Northwest UAV. “With this certificate of operation and our full-service campus all in one area, our customers are able to design, build, test and instantly troubleshoot their UAV needs, which substantially decreases project turn time from design to deployment.”

“We’re excited to offer the opportunity to legally fly drones in the McMinnville area,” said David Jackson, Northwest UAV’s facility security officer. “As a licensed private and unmanned vehicle pilot, I’m well aware of the risks involved in any airspace. With this knowledge, we prepared accordingly to make sure our operations remain within FAA regulations and keep everyone in our airspace (and around it) safe.”

Cathy Cahill, director of UAF’s ACUASI, is pleased to have the new site as part of the test range. “We are delighted to support the additional safe research, development, testing and evaluation of unmanned aircraft technology that will be possible with our new range and partners in McMinnville,” she said.

ADDITIONAL CONTACTS: Cathy Cahill, director, ACUASI, cfcahill@alaska.edu, 907-474-6905. David Jackson, facility security officer, Northwest UAV, david.jackson@nwuav.com, 503-434-6845.

Every Alaskan owns at least one version of a sensitive scientific instrument: the thermometer. But what is it measuring?

Because hot and cold are relative terms, sometimes our senses can’t be trusted to tell us the difference. For example, a tub of ice water will feel warm if you stick your foot in it after walking barefoot at 40 below.

Real hot and cold can be thought of as a measurement of motion: the temperature of water, air, motor oil or any other substance is a measure of the average speed of molecules and atoms within the substance. The faster the molecules are bumping around, the higher the temperature.

If we had a freezer capable of cooling air to minus 459 degrees Fahrenheit, for example, the oxygen, nitrogen and hydrogen molecules within air would theoretically stop moving. This point, known as absolute zero, is the starting point of the Kelvin scale, which was named after Lord Kelvin, a British scientist who lived from 1824 to 1907.

The Kelvin scale is useful for temperature measurements in space. The average temperature of the universe is about 2.7 Kelvins, or  minus 454.8 degrees Fahrenheit. Temperatures on Earth are much higher because of several factors: the sun’s warmth, the ability of Earth’s surface to absorb solar radiation, and the heat-trapping effects of the atmosphere, a 30-mile shell of gases.

Because Earth is tilted on its axis, the north and south poles lean away from direct sunlight for much of the year. Although we northerners tend to talk tough about our cold snaps, those on the other end of the globe feel greater extremes. The coldest temperature ever measured was minus 129 degrees Fahrenheit, at Vostok, a Russian scientific station in Antarctica, on July 21, 1983.

Antarctica, a mountainous continent larger than the United States (even with Alaska tacked on), is colder than the North Pole. Antarctica averages at least 35 degrees colder than the Arctic. The highest temperature ever recorded at the geographic South Pole, located on Antarctica, is 9.9 degrees F. The average yearly temperature at the same spot is minus 57 degrees F.

The lowest temperature recorded this side of the equator, minus 90 degrees F, was recorded at Verkhoyansk, Russia. Closer to home, Snag, a lonely outpost in the Yukon Territory, holds North America’s cold record with a reading of minus 81 F on Feb. 3, 1947.

That just nips Alaska’s coldest official temperature, a minus 80 F felt at Prospect Creek off the Dalton Highway north of the Yukon River on Jan. 23, 1971.

Now that you are chilled with thoughts of Alaska’s air molecules at their most sluggish, a warmer thought: the official high temperature for Hawaii is identical to Alaska’s high. Thermometers in Fort Yukon (in 1915), and Pahala, Hawaii (in 1931), reached the same high temperature, a level that hasn’t been reached in Alaska since — 100 degrees F.

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 2004.

We’ve heard it many times: “You are what you eat.” The concept enabled college sophomore Annie Masterman to do cutting edge research connecting humpback whales to their diet.

Every organism has a distinct signature of stable isotopes like carbon and nitrogen. As a whale digests its food, the prey’s stable isotope “signature” is incorporated into the whale’s baleen. Based on the various levels of stable isotopes found within baleen, Masterman spent the summer reconstructing what humpback whales eat.

Masterman, who is originally from Bethel, Alaska, and now attends University of Alaska Southeast, conducted this research as part of an internship with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s humpback whale monitoring project. The work began 30 years ago after the Exxon Valdez oil spill. Involvement in such research, though unusual for a student so young, is increasingly possible for undergraduates through several programs at the University of Alaska Fairbanks.

Including Masterman, 13 undergraduate students from universities across the United States spent the summer at UAF conducting research and learning about the Arctic. The students were hosted jointly by the International Arctic Research Center and NOAA’s National Marine Fisheries Service to gain exposure to interdisciplinary science and resource management careers.

Five of the students were part of NOAA’s Partnership for Education Program Alaska, a regionally based marine education and workforce training effort housed at IARC as a result of a long-standing partnership between the two organizations. PEP AK students conduct course work at IARC and then apply their knowledge by completing internships at NOAA offices and labs in Juneau.

According to program coordinator Sorina Stalla, PEP AK “seeks to build a more diverse, inclusive, and effective marine and natural resource workforce in Alaska.”

“This was one of the best experiences of my life,” said Kara Chuang, a senior at the University of California, Berkeley. During her nine weeks in Alaska, she interned with NOAA Fisheries’ Ocean Guardian School Program.

“My tasks were to gather resources and form a comprehensive curriculum for local Alaska schools,” she said. Chuang’s curriculum focused on promoting marine stewardship and conservation practices among youth. In addition to her education and outreach internship, Chuang documented her Alaska experience through video.

Individuals like Chuang motivate atmospheric sciences professor Vladimir Alexeev to work with students and promote programs that bring young scientists with new and creative ideas to UAF. For these programs to succeed, he said, “university support is extremely important,” especially when it comes to travel and fieldwork logistics.

Alexeev is co-leader of PEP AK and IARC’s Research Experience for Undergraduate program. REU compliments PEP AK’s focus on resource management by providing hands-on research exposure to students interested in pursuing a scientific career.

This summer, eight REU students were paired with science faculty at UAF, engaging in projects that ranged from modeling the future size of a coastal glacier to examining changes in wind across the state. At the summer’s culmination, students presented their findings to a packed room of UAF researchers, family members and fellow young scientists.

“I’ve been working on a project with John Walsh about wind trends in Alaska,” said Sarah Pearl, from Dartmouth College. Their climate model output showed a trend toward more future storms in coastal areas where sea ice is retreating, potentially increasing the risk of coastal flooding and erosion. Pearl and Walsh, the chief scientist at IARC, are preparing to publish their findings in the journal Atmospheric and Climate Sciences next month.

Programs like PEP AK and REU strengthen the connection between education and workforce. Kaja Brix, NOAA Fisheries Arctic Program director, who oversees PEP AK, believes the connection will become more important as the Arctic warms.

“The changing Arctic demands new approaches to solving our problems,” explained Brix. “Resource management agencies like NOAA are called on to solve those problems, but they need the expertise and intellectual capacity of academic institutes.”

This is the third summer that REU students were hosted at IARC and the first summer for PEP AK. Both Alexeev and Brix hope that there will be continued support for the programs.

2019 NOAA Partnership for Education Program students:

Annie Masterman, Bethel, Alaska

Dillon Quealey, Sitka, Alaska

Summer Morse, Wasilla, Alaska

Kara Chuang, Los Angeles, California

Joseph Monsef, Juneau, Alaska

2019 IARC Research Experience for Undergraduate students:

Zoe Screwvala, Brooklyn, New York

Rachel Chen, Cary, North Carolina

Nicole June, Fabius, New York

Grant Morey, Saint Charles, Missouri

Jake Eiting, South Bountiful, Utah

Rosalie Krasnoff, Ithaca, New York

Sarah Pearl, Los Angeles, California

Chiara Arellano, Corte Madera, California

PEP was funded by NOAA Fisheries Alaska Region, Arctic Program. REU was funded by the National Science Foundation and logistical support from UAF’s Vice Chancellor of Research.

The University of Alaska Fairbanks School of Management will award $30,000 in cash prizes through its annual Arctic Innovation Competition.

The competition, presented by Usibelli Coal Mine, is now in its 11th year. Competitors propose new, feasible and potentially profitable ideas, which are evaluated by a panel of judges. The deadline to submit an entry is 11:59 p.m. Friday, Sept. 20, 2019.

In 2018, submissions covered a broad range of subjects. Winning ideas included a thermal battery that stores energy using a heat sink built into a house’s foundation, clothing made with space blankets to keep body heat from escaping, and an ergonomically designed paint roller handle that reduces wrist and joint fatigue. Last year’s $10,000 grand-prize winner was Joshua Resnick for his idea, Parallel Drones, which extends flight times and payload capability in drones, allowing them to make rural deliveries, conduct wildlife tracking and help fight wildfires.

The competition is open to the public, there is no entry fee and ideas do not have to be related to the Arctic. Three divisions are now accepting submissions: Main Division, for ages 18 and up; Junior Division, for ages 13-17; and Cub Division, for ages 12 and under. New this year is a $2,000 prize for the best air-quality-related idea. Individuals or teams are encouraged to enter, and multiple ideas are accepted. After the initial screening process, over 30 winners will be selected to receive cash prizes ranging from $25 to $10,000. Finalists will showcase their ideas to judges from 3-5 p.m. Saturday, Oct. 19, at the Wedgewood Resort, with a reception to follow. The public is invited to attend.

ADDITIONAL CONTACT: Tammy Tragis-McCook, 907-474-7042, tammy.tragis@alaska.edu

ON THE WEB: www.arcticinno.com

The reindeer research herd at the Fairbanks Experiment Farm has moved to a bison and reindeer farm near Delta Junction.

Thirty-five of the reindeer were transferred two weeks ago. Two remaining reindeer used for outreach, Roger and Olivia, moved Friday to the University of Alaska Fairbanks’ Large Animal Research Station near the Fairbanks campus.

The Bureau of Indian Affairs, which owns the animals, approved the transfer. The university’s Reindeer Research Program has maintained a herd at UAF since 1997 for research on range management, nutrition and feed rations. The herd, which has also been used for educational outreach, has been a familiar sight in the fields opposite the Georgeson Botanical Garden.

Milan Shipka, the director of the UAF Agricultural and Forestry Experiment Station, said the transfer reflects a shift in program goals. The new emphasis will focus more on outreach, as well as developing range and business plans for communities interested in establishing a reindeer herd for meat production.

The Delta Junction bison and reindeer farm is owned by the Stevens Village Tribal Council, which has been working with the reindeer program for five years. Representatives have attended reindeer husbandry workshops at UAF and have been developing a herd on the 2,000-acre farm.

“This was an opportunity to help an Alaska Native entity develop a red meat industry,” Shipka said. “This has the potential to be a sizable Native-owned operation on the road system.”

Being on the road system allows for a USDA-inspected slaughter and greatly improves market opportunities, Shipka said. The farm will get a higher price for the reindeer meat because it will be able to sell USDA-inspected meat.

The reindeer were moved to Delta Junction in enclosed trailers. Greg Finstad, the reindeer program manager, said the farm will be a good location for the reindeer because of its access to the road system and to inexpensive reindeer feed, including hay, barley and oats.

Finstad said said 10 of the reindeer going to the farm will eventually be transferred to the family-owned Midnite Sun Ranch near Nome.

He said the program is working on a memorandum of agreement with the Tanana Chiefs Conference to continue using the research herd for animal husbandry outreach and research as needed.

Finstad said his program is working with other Yukon River communities, as well as reindeer herders on the Seward Peninsula, St. Paul Island and Saint Lawrence Island to develop reindeer production and use hygienic slaughter practices to increase the value of the meat they sell. The program also will continue to provide husbandry and meat production training.

“We still have a lot of work to do,” he said.

ADDITIONAL CONTACTS: Milan Shipka, 907-474-7429, mpshipka@alaska.edu; Greg Finstad, 907-474-6055, glfinstad@alaska.edu

KUAC public radio and television will stop carrying several radio and television channels on Oct. 1 due to budget reductions.

The television channels include 9.7 and 9.8, which are radio channels on television, and 9.9, which is 360 North. The station will also stop broadcasting online digital radio channels KUAC 2 and KUAC 3. Those channels provide both programming and streaming service.

In August, the governor vetoed funding for public broadcasting across the state and for the Alaska Public Broadcasting Commission. With this veto, KUAC lost $155,539 in revenue for the fiscal year 2020 budget, which began July 1.

In addition to the direct cuts to public broadcasting, KUAC’s budget is also being affected by state funding cuts to the University of Alaska. Those cuts mean an additional reduction of about $500,000, or about 17% of the station’s total FY19 budget of $2.9 million. KUAC is owned and operated by the university and is housed on the University of Alaska Fairbanks campus.

In the last seven years, KUAC has cut more than $1 million from its budget.

“Most of the cuts have been invisible to the public,” said Keith Martin, general manager. “Over the years, we’ve restructured, we’ve cut deals, we’ve streamlined our operations to the point that most of our staff members are doing multiple positions. With the latest budget reductions, the necessary changes will impact over-the-air services as well as staff.”

Terminating the digital radio channels means that KUAC will no longer be able to air the UA Board of Regents call-in public testimony on KUAC 2 or the first hour of the Fairbanks North Star Borough School Board on KUAC 3. Terminating the KUAC TV channels means that the public will no longer be able to tune in to the digital radio channels or 360 North on KUAC TV.

“(Discontinuing these five channels) will not cover the full cut of nearly $700,000 in a single year,” said Martin. “Unfortunately, with the short notice, we’re continuing to make decisions while attempting to minimize disruptions to our listeners and viewers. But KUAC will not be the same.”

The station will likely find additional cost savings as contracts come to term and KUAC allows them to expire. This will mean that some programming will not be renewed.

KUAC will focus on its primary services, the services that FM listeners have come to expect of their public broadcasting station over the past 57 years and TV viewers over the past 48 years.

ADDITIONAL CONTACTS: Keith Martin, general manager, 907-474-5089, keith.kuac@alaska.edu. Gretchen Gordon, KUAC assistant general manager, 907-474-1891, gretchen.kuac@alaska.edu.

Building, repairing and maintaining vessels can be hazardous work. The rate of injury and illness on ships and in boatyards is more than double those of construction and general industry, according to federal officials.

Alaska Sea Grant has a new, online booklet aimed at making boatyards safer by explaining the risks and recommending ways that boat owners and builders, boatyard employees, technicians and others can protect themselves.

“Boatyard Hazards – Tips for Protecting Worker Safety and Health” is not a comprehensive safety and health manual. Rather, it’s an easy-to-read, 16-page resource with information on:

● Who the regulatory authorities are who oversee boatyard safety and health
● How to conduct a hazard analysis and draft a set of best practices
● How to identify types of injury and health risks associated with boatyard work
● Understanding preventive measures for a range of risks
● Selection and use of personal protective equipment
● Reading and interpreting a material safety data sheet
● Overall tips for staying safe

Terry Johnson, retired Alaska Sea Grant Marine Advisory agent and emeritus professor at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, authored the manual, which is available as a free download from the Alaska Sea Grant website. An experienced mariner, Johnson said the guide book resulted from discussions he had with representatives of the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health and the Alaska Marine Safety Education Association. They told Johnson that boat owners, boatyard employees and many others could benefit from a clear, concise handbook explaining hazards specific to their workplace and how to minimize risk.

“Some excellent books published by government and research agencies address specific issues of boatyard health and safety in detail, but most boatyard workers don’t have time to read them. This booklet is a handy reference and a worker can read through it in just a few minutes,” Johnson said.

The author noted that he has been working on boats since the mid-1970s and only became aware of the toxic and hazardous materials he had been exposed to in recent years.

“Professionals in the boat building and repair trades should be trained to recognize and avoid these threats. But boat owners, crew members, and boatyard recent hires may not have all the knowledge they need to avoid sickness, injury and death. That’s what makes this handbook so valuable,” said Jerry Dzugan, AMSEA executive director.

ADDITIONAL CONTACTS: Terry Johnson,907-887-3739, inconnu@ak.net. Jerry Dzugan, 907-747-3287, director@amsea.org.

ON THE WEB: alaskaseagrant.org

It is a pleasant day for a walk in middle Alaska, with blue sky overhead, sandhill cranes croaking above the University of Alaska Fairbanks farm, and the sharp scent of sliced blades of grass, mowed for perhaps the last time in 2019.

I am hiking the length of a new planet-walk display with Peter Delamere. In a little less than one mile, we will span the relative distance from the sun to dwarf planet Pluto. Delamere is a researcher and teacher at UAF’s Geophysical Institute and Physics Department. He knows a lot about each of the heavenly spheres mounted on signs along Yukon Drive, which is arrow-straight and runs up to the high point of the campus.

I have known Pete for a long time. When he was a Ph.D. student here in the 1990s, I interviewed him for this column about one of his favorite applications of physics, the flying disc. Though a few solar cycles have passed since then, he still, at 50, enjoys playing Ultimate.

With the sun warming our backs from 93 million miles away, Pete shows me the first of 10 signs spread out along Yukon Drive, on the northwest part of the UAF campus, overlooking the flats of the Tanana River. This signpost represents the sun.

The giant hot sphere of gas that enables our existence is not pictured to scale, Pete says. If all the planets on the walk were of representative size, the sun would be a golf ball and Pluto a speck of dust.

We move a few strides east, to Mercury, the closest planet to the sun. Pete officially classifies Mercury as boring, a little sphere pockmarked from impacts, one that has no significant shell of gases we call an atmosphere.

Another step away is Venus, a “hazy blob” with a surface temperature that would melt the lead of your pencil. This is due to a runaway greenhouse effect, Pete explains. Venus reminds him of a cautionary tale as he leads me another step, to Jimi Hendrix’s Third Stone from the Sun, Earth.

Were it not for Earth’s 30-mile shell of gases that traps heat, all the water on the surface would be frozen. The greenhouse effect, he reminds me, is crucial for life on Earth.

But it is also possible to have too much of a good thing.

“It’s cool that our neighbor has an extreme greenhouse atmosphere,” Pete says, pointing to the Venus sign. “You worry about the possibility of a transition from this (Earth’s atmosphere) to there. Non-linear feedbacks are a frightening thing.”

What’s an example of a non-linear feedback?

“That’s maybe when more of the Amazon rainforest burns, less plants capture less CO2 and we capture more heat in the oceans — a positive feedback,” he says.

As that thought hangs in the air, we walk a few steps to the planet with which humans have long been fascinated, Mars.

The Red Planet might have once been Earth-like, Pete says, with its ice caps at the polar regions and surface features gouged by water.

“Elon Musk would like to live there,” Pete says. “I don’t think I would like the trip.”

We turn and continue east, leaving behind the dense cluster of sun, Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars.

“Now, we start to realize the scale,” Pete says.

Though the first four planets are just steps away from each other, we walk four minutes before we see the next sign, the one with a portrait of Jupiter. Jupiter is five times as far from the sun as we are.

Jupiter is Pete’s favorite. Not only is it twice as big as all other planets combined, its Great Red Spot is a hurricane-like storm that’s been going strong for more than a century. Even more attractive to the space-plasma physicist is its constant display of aurorae, which Pete ranks the most amazing in the solar system.

Unlike Earth’s aurora, driven by the interaction of our magnet-like planet with the particle-rich solar wind spewed by the sun, Jupiter has aurora that would fire even without the sun. Io, one its 79 moons, tickles Jupiter’s atmosphere to create aurora.

Pete studies this predictable aurora and the magnetosphere of Jupiter with funding from NASA. He says the interaction of Jupiter’s moon Io with the planet is similar to reactions he and other researchers have seen during rocket-carried plasma experiments from Poker Flat Research Range, north of Fairbanks.

And what is plasma? It’s one of the four fundamental states of matter (along with solid, liquid and gas), a mostly invisible mass of ions and electrons. Though understanding plasma takes some imagination, Pete reminds his students that 99 percent of the known universe consists of it.

We continue on 158 steps (each one representing 2.5 million miles) to Saturn, with its familiar rings. It is more than nine times larger than Earth, and Pete’s second most-frequent study subject in Alaska and earlier at the University of Colorado Boulder, where he studied before seizing an opportunity to return here.

He has written more than one dozen papers on the ringed planet, mostly on the solar wind’s interaction with Saturn. He used data provided from the Cassini spacecraft, which orbited Saturn from 2005 to 2017, at which time controllers sent it plunging into Saturn’s atmosphere, vaporizing it.

“I know more about Earth’s magnetosphere by looking at these planets first,” Pete says. “Earth is more complicated than these guys.”

We take a few breaths in silence near the Saturn sign. The birch leaves around us are senescing from lime green to lemon yellow. We both notice the contrail of a plane sketching the blue sky overhead as the pilot flies people from Dallas to Tokyo. We wonder if those looking out the window know they are hurdling the Alaska Range.

We turn again, to continue eastward to ice-giant Uranus. It is a bit of a walk.

“Now the scaling gets crazy,” he says. “Getting to these guys (Uranus, Neptune and Pluto) is incredibly challenging.”

Pete is referring to we humans firing spacecraft from launchpads in the desert to moving targets billions of miles away. The New Horizons spacecraft that passed by Pluto not long ago took nine years to get there from here.

We walk away from the lovely cool-blue Uranus, dodging students on the sidewalk who just started the fall semester at UAF. They look younger every year. Pete teaches some of them, in a class called Vibrations and Waves.

“It’s the third part of classical physics for undergrads,” he says.

We stop at a sign for Neptune, installed just outside Skarland Hall, where I bunked as a UAF student during Ronald Reagan’s second term. Pete likes Neptune because it has a quirky moon, Triton, that rotates in the opposite direction of the planet’s spin — a nifty retrograde orbit.

We humans could send a spacecraft to study Triton, Pete says. The mission would cost about $1 billion, equal to everybody in the U.S. sacrificing one cup of coffee for one day.

Why should we?

“It inspires kids,” he says. “There’s so much awe and wonder, like with the Pluto mission. It’s absolutely remarkable we can do these missions.”

We keep on, reaching our farthest point from where we started, about 45 minutes and 0.8 miles away from the sun. We have arrived at Pluto.

Pete is pleased. He thinks this 45 minutes is perfect for the target audience, groups of students from elementary school on up.

“It really cements the scaling when you do a significant walk,” he says.

Pete points to a recent image of Pluto taken during the New Horizons flyby.

“My daughter thinks the face looks like Snoopy,” he says of an icy methane-nitrogen splotch on the surface.

Pete is an expert on Pluto, classified as a dwarf planet in 2006. A graduate student he works with, Nathan Barnes, recently wrote a paper on the reaction of the solar wind with Pluto. Pete has worked with the plasma-instrument teams on the New Horizons mission since its beginning in 2006.

“When they launched it, I thought it’d be years before we got results, but those nine years flew by,” he says.

Yes, they did. We turn and walk back toward the sun.

The UAF Planet Walk was the idea of Bob McCoy, the director of the Geophysical Institute. Pete worked with UAF physics students, artists, and UAF Physical Plant workers to get signs up representing the planets. For those in Fairbanks, there will be a UAF Planet Walk opening celebration from 2-5 p.m. on Saturday, Sept. 14. See https://www.gi.alaska.edu/services/education-outreach/planet-walk for details.

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.

September is national preparedness month and, for many Alaskans, that means thinking about tsunamis.

With the most earthquakes and the longest coastline in the U.S., Alaska is the state most vulnerable to tsunamis. However, planning for natural disasters is difficult across a landscape peppered with communities only accessible by boat or seaplane.

The Alaska Earthquake Center’s new Alaska Tsunami Hazard Map Tool will help people plan for the worst. The tool, which went live this month, is an online map portal that displays potential tsunami hazard zones for settlements across Alaska.

“We have decades of top-notch research on what each community should, and should not, be worrying about in the next tsunami,” said Michael West, Alaska state seismologist and director of the earthquake center. “I am excited because this tool helps put that information in the palm of every Alaskan.”

Since 1998, the Alaska Earthquake Center, part of the University of Alaska Fairbanks Geophysical Institute, has been working in partnership with the Alaska Division of Geological and Geophysical Surveys and the Alaska Division of Homeland Security and Emergency Management to map tsunami inundation zones in coastal Alaska communities.

Maps were previously available as individual paper or digital documents, which could often be quite large. The new Alaska Tsunami Hazard Map Tool makes this information easier to access, especially for rural communities with limited internet connectivity.

“This is why I came to Alaska: to make something that actually helps people living in the danger zone,” said Elena Suleimani, a senior tsunami scientist ­with the project, who came to Alaska from Russia in 1993 to pursue a Ph.D. in tsunami science at UAF. “Finally, we made something for John Smith living in Valdez.”

The production of tsunami maps involves several stages. First, researchers develop hypothetical tsunami scenarios and create computer model simulations for each. Then they compare the results with historical tsunami observations. Based on these, they are able to calculate the maximum likely extent of flooding.

The final result is a map that shows the possible extent of tsunami flooding, or inundation. The possible depth of the water on dry land, or flow depth, is also calculated when enough data for the community is available.

In total, 55 communities are included in the tool. They were selected based on factors such as tsunami hazard exposure, location, infrastructure and availability of data.

That is where these maps are most useful: to help communities plan.

Suleimani explained that residents of Alaska coastal communities need to evacuate as soon as they feel an earthquake. In Alaska, tsunamis generated by nearby earthquakes represent “near-field” hazards. In other words, people have minutes rather than hours to reach safety.

“What you need to do at 4 a.m. when the ground starts shaking, you need to grab your things and run uphill or wherever your community decided to go,” she said. “You shouldn’t wait for officials to tell you what to do; you need to know in advance what to do. And these maps are what prepare you.”

The Alaska Earthquake Center helps communities decide, well before an emergency, where that safe place is and the best way to respond.

“This is the tool that allows households to develop their personal evacuation plans,” West said. “It empowers communities to come together and make informed decisions about how to plan for disaster.”

So, what’s next? Action.

“The inundation map is just the first step. Now we know the safe area,” Suleimani said. “Then we go to the community and we ask them, ‘Where will you put your shelter?’”

ADDITIONAL CONTACTS: Elena Suleimani, 907-474-7997, ensuleimani@alaska.edu and Dmitry Nicolsky, 907-474-7397, djnicolsky@alaska.edu.

The Nov. 30, 2018, magnitude 7.1 earthquake in Southcentral Alaska was the most impactful earthquake in the U.S. in many years. A symposium next week will focus on the 2018 earthquake and its consequences, and highlight the research during the past year.

The meeting will include local and national experts in a wide range of disciplines in research and practice working to learn how to better respond to future earthquakes. Topics include seismology, geology, structural and geotechnical engineering, emergency management and response, tsunami monitoring, modeling, public safety and public policy from experts across academia, private research and government agencies. 

 WHO: The symposium will be led by co-chairs from different disciplines and key stakeholder groups in Alaska:

• Michael West, state seismologist and director of the Alaska Earthquake Center at the University of Alaska Fairbanks
• Sterling Strait, chair, Alaska Seismic Hazards Safety Commission 
• Jessica Feenstra, president, Alaska Chapter of Earthquake Engineering Institute 
• Wael Hassan, associate professor, civil engineering, University of Alaska Anchorage 

WHAT: One Year Later: Symposium on the 2018 magnitude 7.1 Anchorage Earthquake

WHEN: Sept. 24-26, 2019

WHERE: Hotel Captain Cook, 939 W. Fifth Ave., Anchorage

CONTACT: Fritz Freudenberger, 907-474-7185 or ffreudenberger@alaska.edu 

MEDIA INSTRUCTIONS: Free registration for members of the media (meals not included). Please sign in at the registration desk. RSVP encouraged.

ON THE WEB: Details and full program available at https://earthquake.alaska.edu/eqsymposium

If you want to live in a place where nothing changes, don’t live in Alaska.

A gold miner once told me that. He was referring to new houses that would pop up on the hillside across the valley, but his words ring true regarding natural Alaska, where recent, measurable differences are enough to make you dizzy.

University of Alaska Fairbanks researchers took a few breaths recently to put together a new document. In it, they summarize what scientists have observed in this place that is changing faster than anywhere else in the U.S.

Rick Thoman and John Walsh of UAF’s International Arctic Research Center, with help from editor Heather McFarland, have created the 15-page “Alaska’s Changing Environment: Documenting Alaska’s Physical and Biological Changes Through Observations.”

Team members decided to avoid technical language, and to include no predictions for the future. Here’s part of their current state of the state:

Wildfire seasons with more than 1 million acres burned (black patches the size of Rhode Island) have increased by 50% since 1990.

Before 2004, Fairbanks residents experienced only one summer with more than three weeks of significant wildfire smoke. Since then, we have breathed in five such summers, including in 2019.

The earliest ice breakup in recorded history of the Tanana River at Nenana was on April 14, 2019. The previous earliest was April 20. Nine of the 10 earliest breakup days there have happened since the mid-1990s.

People in the village of Northway felt the sting of minus 30 degree F air about 40 days each year before 1960. In the last 10 years, Northway residents have experienced less than one month per year of such days.

Since 2014, thermometers from Ketchikan to Utqiagvik have recorded from five to 30 times more record highs than record lows. Homer has seen one of the most extreme percentages of record high temperatures since 2014, but all Alaska towns with enduring weather records have experienced way more record highs than lows.

Alaska had its warmest average air temperature in 2016 and its warmest all-time month in July 2019. Alaska air temperatures are rising twice as fast as other places in the country.

Autumns and winters have been much warmer in all regions of Alaska when compared to the period 1981 through 2010. During the past five years, however, summer temperatures have been close to normal for most of Alaska.

Tundra plants of Alaska’s North Slope have increased in greenness in recent years, showing more plant growth north of the Brooks Range. Growing seasons have become longer in Alaska.

Alaska’s snowpack now develops about a week later in the fall and melts almost two weeks earlier in the spring compared to the late 1990s.

Sea ice, the refrigerator of the world, is currently nowhere in sight from the Alaska coast. In September 2019, the ice that floats on northern oceans is a shrunken disc more than 500 miles toward the North Pole over the dark-water horizon. In Septembers past, the Chukchi and Beaufort seas had ice people could sometimes see from northern Alaska. “Nothing in the Alaska environment is changing faster than sea ice,” Walsh and Thoman wrote.

Because of the loss of that heat reflector, temperatures in the farthest north town in the United States have been way above average each October since 2001. In Utqiagvik’s recent past, sea ice was present on the nearby ocean during the entire month, or had at least formed by late October.

In summer 2019, ocean surface temperatures were 4 to 11 degrees F warmer than average all along the west coast of Alaska. The ocean surrounding Alaska is warmer now than at any time during the past 150 years.

Ocean temperatures have resulted in dramatic expanses of algal blooms, some with toxins that poison shellfish. Warm temperatures are affecting billions of organisms adapted to colder water.

Permafrost, ground that has remained frozen through the heat of at least two summers and sometimes thousands of them, is thawing everywhere. Scientists did not think they would see changes to “cold” permafrost in northern Alaska for decades, but even North Slope permafrost 50 feet underground is getting warmer.

Each year since 2002, 60 billion tons of Alaska glacier ice has melted, becoming ocean water.

In June and July 2019, thousands of salmon died as they migrated to spawning grounds in western Alaska, possibly because water is too warm for them. Yukon River water temperature at Pilot Station, about 100 miles above the mouth, was 64 F in summer 2019, the highest ever recorded.

After a career with the National Weather Service, Rick Thoman now works for the International Arctic Research Center. His sharpest tool is his Twitter account (@AlaskaWx), from which he fires pithy blurbs on sea ice, warm ocean temperatures and towns in Alaska breaking air-temperature records.

John Walsh earned the title of President’s Professor of Global Change at UAF in 2001, years before moose hunters noticed September nights were too warm to cool their hanging bags of flesh.

You can see and download Alaska’s Changing Environment at https://uaf-iarc.org/our-work/alaskas-changing-environment/.

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.

A National Science Foundation award to University of Alaska Fairbanks researcher Chris Maio will support research and education in western Alaska coastal communities that are affected by severe storms. Maio has been awarded $800,000 to fund studies of storm-driven coastal hazards.

The five-year grant focuses on funding extensive field work at four sites in western Alaska and will introduce new research instruments, fund an undergrad intern program, and develop K-12 curriculum specially designed for Alaska Native communities in coastal regions. The NSF CAREER awards include a federal grant for research and education activities for five consecutive years. They are awarded to exemplary junior faculty who excel in combining education and research within the framework of the mission of their organizations.

Maio, who serves as associate professor of coastal geography at the UAF College of Natural Science and Mathematics, has already helped implement citizen-based erosion monitoring programs in more than 20 Alaska villages. The project will work to teach residents to scientifically measure the impacts of storms, and will also help communities meet the requirements needed to receive funding from the Environmental Protection Agency and other sources for mitigating the effects of disasters.

The NSF CAREER grant will help researchers understand modern, historic, and prehistoric storm impacts in western Alaska while supporting informed decision making and increased research capacity in the Arctic.

“We’re looking into modern storm impacts, and also how the decline in sea ice plays into that,” said Maio. “We’re doing sediment coring to gain long-term context, which helps us understand what is happening today as well as what could happen in the future.”

In addition to providing long-term context, the funding will also help build educational opportunities within Alaska Native communities. Through internships, K-12 curriculum development, and community workshops, the researchers hope to position stakeholders so they can develop strategies that will help protect both people and infrastructure.

“There’s so little information about how storms impact coastlines in Alaska, we’re trying to build records and information so other scientists can utilize that, and better understand how storms could change the coastlines in the future,” said Maio.

Five UAF researchers are among hundreds of scientists worldwide who will spend part of the coming year on board a research ship frozen in the Arctic sea ice.

The 387-foot icebreaker Polarstern will embark from Tromsø, Norway today to kick off MOSAiC, the world’s largest and most comprehensive expedition to the central Arctic Ocean. During the next year, the Polarstern will be locked in the frozen sea ice and set to drift past the North Pole. The UAF team will share their experiences via a weekly blog.

The Multidisciplinary Drifting Observatory for the Study of Arctic Climate will capture chemical, physical and biological data related to the ocean, sea ice, snow and atmosphere. The goal of the project is to understand why the Arctic is warming faster than any other region on the planet. Arctic sea ice loss is already impacting sea level rise, storminess, and ocean and atmospheric warming at lower latitudes.

More than 600 scientists from 17 nations will participate in the expedition, which is led by the Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research. An international fleet of helicopters, aircraft and icebreakers will supply the team during its voyage.

“This mission is groundbreaking,” said AWI’s Markus Rex, head of MOSAiC. “For the first time we will be able to measure the climate processes in the central Arctic in winter. And so, for the first time, we will be able to understand this region and correctly represent it in climate models.”

Rob Rember, a researcher at the International Arctic Research Center and UAF’s science lead on the expedition, expects that MOSAiC will multiply the amount of existing data by a factor of a thousand.

“The amount of sea ice data physically collected [from the Arctic Ocean] from October to March is very, very small,” Rember said.

Rember will be at sea for 100 days this year. The UAF team will rotate through several shifts on the Polarstern. UAF postdoctoral researcher Marc Oggier will spend 195 days at sea, getting through the long, dark months with 10 pounds each of good chocolate and yerba mate.

The team hopes to gain a complete picture of what’s happening in the Arctic Ocean, particularly where the ocean, sea ice and atmosphere meet, Rember said. “We’re working at the interfaces, so how does the ice interact with the snow, and how do they both interact with the water column, and how the water column interacts back with the ice.”

These areas are where gases and nutrients are transferred between the ocean and ice, and the ice and the atmosphere.

“Think of sea ice as a substrate where life can be and where nutrients get cycled and recycled,” said Ana Aguilar-Islas, MOSAiC participant and an associate professor at the UAF College of Fisheries and Ocean Sciences. In the ocean system, these nutrients are used by phytoplankton and sea ice algae to grow and ultimately feed the rest of the food web.

“It’s basically the same as your garden; you need the right mixture of nutrients to be productive,” explained Rember.

The Polarstern will be attached to the same sheet of floating ice for the entire seasonal cycle, which will allow the UAF team constant access to the ice. They will gather sea water, snow and cores of ice drilled from the frozen sea, then melt, filter and analyze the samples in a lab onboard the Polarstern and back at UAF to quantify their nutrient content.

“Throughout the whole year, every week, we are going to make the same set of measurements,” Oggier said. Those measurements will show how nutrients in the Arctic change throughout the year.

Since space is limited on the ship, each researcher will do a variety of tasks in addition to their own research. For example, Oggier will help other scientists survey ice ridges, use underwater cameras to explore the bottom of the ice, and take images of ice and snow using MRI-like instruments.

As a young scientist, this part of the expedition is an opportunity that many people would dream of, Oggier said. “I’m really excited because I’m going to learn lots of stuff.”

MOSAiC is offering researchers a chance to be a part of something extraordinary, Rember said, “This opportunity will never come along again.”

In addition to Rember, Oggier and Aguilar-Islas, other UAF participants include Mette Kaufman, a research professional at IARC; and Rachel Lekanoff, a doctoral student in CFOS. The National Science Foundation is funding UAF’s participation in MOSAiC.

ADDITIONAL CONTACTS: Ana Aguilar-Islas, 907-474-1524, amaguilarislas@alaska.edu. Hajo Eicken, 907-474-7280, heicken@alaska.edu.

FOLLOW MOSAiC ONLINE: To read about their journey visit https://uaf-iarc.org/engagement/expeditions/mosaic/ or follow them on twitter, @ArcticMosaic or Facebook, @MOSAiCuaf. Search for more information from partner institutions using the hashtags #MOSAiCexpedition. Download the MOSAiC web app to see Polarstern’s drift route live, follow.mosaic-expedition.org

NOTE TO EDITORS: Photos are available for download at http://bit.ly/UAFmosaiclaunch. Access video from a press conference in Tromsø at https://www.youtube.com/user/AWIresearch.