Ned Rozell
907-474-7468
1/30/2012

The latest meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco in December 2011 featured hundreds of talks about Earth science, some of those relating to Alaska (and some of those comprehensible to a non-scientist). Here are a few items from the notebook I carried around the Moscone Center:

An Aleutian Island morphs at high speed: Chris Waythomas of the Alaska Volcano Observatory in Anchorage spoke of how Kasatochi Island in the Aleutians has changed in diameter since its explosive 2008 eruption. “Erosion by wave action has eaten away the coast at about (1,000 feet) per year. This may be a world record,” he said. That’s about three feet of shoreline disappearing daily.

Waythomas also noted that the northern part of the island has lost about 70 percent of the ash and mud deposited by the eruption four years ago, but that the ocean deposited much of it to the south end of the island. “It should be three or four more years until Kasatochi gets to its original size.”

Canada ice on the wane: Glaciologist Garry Clarke of the University of British Columbia said that the portion of the St. Elias Range in Canada will lose half its volume of ice by the year 2100, and almost all the ice in the north and central Rocky Mountains in Canada will be gone by then. “We’re going to be witness during the next century to the disappearance of glaciers in western North America,” Clarke said.

Double the midges on northern river: A second generation of midges hatched last summer along a stretch of the Kuparik River. Normally, only one generation per summer of the small flies emerges from that water, said Michael Kendrick of the University of Alabama. He said scientists once added nutrients to that section of river during a study, but he’s not sure if that, a longer ice-free season, or both made the midges spawn twice as many generations as before.

Atigun squirrels get a jump on summer: Brian Barnes of the University of Alaska Fairbanks’ Institute of Arctic Biology reported on two groups of ground squirrels that he and his colleagues have been studying for years on Alaska’s North Slope. Because of high winds in Atigun Gorge, a group of ground squirrels there has early access to leaves, berries and mushrooms that squirrels at snow-covered Toolik Lake do not have. “They don’t wait for greenup,” Barnes said of the Atigun squirrels, which emerge from hibernation two weeks earlier than Toolik squirrels. “Two weeks is a long time in the Arctic.”

We are still emitting too much carbon dioxide: James Hansen, the Director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York City, shared a message about carbon dioxide at a press conference. He said our releases of the greenhouse gas are “overwhelming.”

“The C02 we’re putting in the atmosphere by fossil fuel burning will stay in the atmosphere a long time before it can be put back into carbonate at the sea floor,” he said. “That tells us we cannot burn all of the fossil fuels (that remain to be extracted from the Earth). If we burn all the fossil fuels, we would send our planet back into the ice-free state . . . If we’re hoping to maintain a planet that looks like the one humanity has known, we’re out of time. We’ve got to turn (carbon dioxide emissions) around.”

This column is provided as a public service by the Geophysical Institute at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, in cooperation with the UAF research community.

Stevie Seibert
907-474-5229
1/27/12

As the Coast Guard Cutter Healy and the tanker vessel Renda moved slowly through sea ice toward Nome, University of Alaska Fairbanks personnel used unmanned aircraft to survey the terrain and plot the safest path for approaching the harbor. The aircraft captured images that allowed scientists to assess ice thickness in places that were too dangerous to traverse on foot. The deployment of UAF’s fleet to Nome is but one example of the aircraft’s application.

Poker Flat Research Range Manager Greg Walker will discuss the growing role of unmanned aircraft in Alaska at the first Science for Alaska Lecture Series presentation Tuesday, Jan. 31 at 7 p.m. in the Westmark Gold Room. The lecture, “Alaska – As Seen From an Unmanned Aircraft,” is the first in the 20th annual Science for Alaska Lecture Series.

Researchers at UAF are harnessing the rapidly developing technology of unmanned aerial vehicles and Geophysical Institute scientists are quickly learning the possibilities as well as the limitations of the aircraft as they deploy their fleet of flying machines from boreal forest to ocean. From climate change to emergency management, unmanned aircraft are able to observe and collect data from a vantage point impossible for human researchers.

Science for Alaska 2012 is sponsored by the Geophysical Institute, UAF and Alyeska Pipeline Service Company. The series runs on Tuesdays through March 6, 2012 and is free to the public. Hands-on activities for all ages begin at 6:30 p.m. inside the Gold Room. Families are welcome.

ADDITIONAL CONTACTS: Greg Walker, Poker Flat Research Range manager, at 907-455-2110 or [email protected]. Amy Hartley, Geophysical Institute public relations manager, at 907-474-5823 or [email protected].

ON THE WEB: http://www.scienceforalaska.com

SS/1-27-12/144-12

Ned Rozell
907-474-7468
1/26/2012

One of the prettiest places in Southeast Alaska has felt some of nature’s most violent behavior.

Lituya Bay, on the Pacific coast about 100 miles southeast of Yakutat and 40 miles west of Glacier Bay, is the site of the largest splash wave ever recorded. In 1958, a magnitude 8.3 earthquake triggered a tremendous landslide into the ocean. The wave that followed reached 1,740 feet above sea level on a hill opposite the slide. The slide also triggered a wave more than 100 feet high that raced down the bay.

Neil Davis, a Fairbanks author, geophysicist, and emeritus professor at the Geophysical Institute at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, flew over Lituya Bay in a Super Cub two days after the earthquake.

“When I got there, it was a truly amazing sight,” Davis said. “The bay was filled with icebergs and trees, and there was a tongue of trees and ice going out to sea outside the bay.”

Seven miles long, two miles wide, and shaped like a T, Lituya Bay is the only refuge for boats along a 100-mile stretch of the Southeast coast. The bay, carved by a glacier and nestled within the snow-covered Fairweather Range, impressed French explorer J. F. La Perouse so that he named it “Port of France” in 1798.

La Perouse soon witnessed the dark side of this beautiful place. The extreme tidal current at the narrow mouth of the bay killed 21 of his men as they explored in small boats. The current at the bay entrance reaches about 14 miles per hour, twice as fast as the Yukon River at Eagle. After a futile search for bodies, La Perouse named the only island within the bay Cenotaph, meaning “empty tomb.”

The shallow entrance to the bay was the most predictable hazard at Lituya Bay, but the absence of Native villages within the bay and distinct lines on hillsides that separated old trees from newer growth hinted at the other. The inland part of the bay lies dead on the Fairweather fault, a weak section of Earth’s crust, which, like the San Andreas fault, causes earthquakes when it fails and slips from side to side.

The 1958 earthquake shook loose millions of cubic yards of dirt and rocks from a 40-degree slope in the northeast corner of the bay. The rock mass displaced a large body of water, causing both the splash wave that rose to 1,740 feet and a gravity wave that was 150 feet high at the head of the bay. The waves sheared and stripped the bark from thousands of trees, some of them four feet in diameter.

The late geologist Don Miller flew over Lituya Bay 12 hours after the earthquake. Miller later interviewed the captains of two of three trolling boats anchored in Lituya Bay at the time of the earthquake. He described their experiences in the U.S. Geological Survey publication, The Giant Waves of Lituya Bay.

The wave sunk one boat near the entrance to the bay, killing a husband and wife. A second boat in mid-bay survived the wave by riding over its crest. Moving about 100 miles per hour, the giant wave carried the third boat over La Chaussee Spit and into the open ocean. The captain recalled riding the wave “like a surfboard” and looking down on trees of the spit as the wave carried him 80 feet above. The captain and his wife survived the trip outside the bay, though their boat did not.

The July earthquake in 1958 was not the first time a giant wave had raced through Lituya Bay. Miller dated the trim lines on the hills and confirmed witnesses accounts of a several giant waves in 1936, and also found evidence of similar waves in the 1850s and 1874. Despite the bay’s violent history, Miller didn’t discourage people from visiting there. He estimated the odds of a giant wave occurring in Lituya Bay on any given day as 9,000-to-1.

This column is provided as a public service by the Geophysical Institute at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, in cooperation with the UAF research community. Ned Rozell is a science writer at the institute.

Geophysical Institute Information Office
907-474-7558
1/25/12

The University of Alaska Fairbanks is offering a professional development course for Alaska educators this spring.

Teachers can enroll to earn up to three credits. The course will build upon topics introduced in the 2012 Science For Alaska Lecture Series and will cover how to connect classrooms with practicing scientists and cutting-edge research.

All assignments are completed online, so teachers can set their own schedule. For more information and registration forms, visit www.scienceforalaska.com.

ON THE WEB: www.scienceforalaska.com

AH/1-25-12/142-12

ASF#2097
Jan. 11, 2012
By Ned Rozell

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Home of the trans-Alaska pipeline, Alaska has been the setting for a few

epic engineering battles rendered against nature. The Million Dollar Bridge,
spanning the lower Copper River, is a reminder of another improbable Alaska
construction project.

Completed in 1910, the Million Dollar Bridge was the crux of the Copper
River and Northwestern Railway, built to carry copper ore 196 miles from
Kennicott to Cordova. Along that route were some of the greatest obstacles
Alaska offers: steep canyons, rivers, hurricane-force winds, mosquitoes,
and dozens of glaciers.

A fortune in high-grade copper locked deep in the Wrangell Mountains
inspired Outside investors, including the Guggenheim family and J.P. Morgan,
to risk building a railway from an ice-free port on Alaska’s southcentral
coast to the rich copper deposits at Kennicott. In 1906, planners
recommended four possible routes to the copper – including two from Valdez
to the Copper River via 2,000-foot passes – but railroad builders chose a
route from Cordova that would follow the Copper River north to Chitina, then
continue 60 miles to Kennicott.

Glaciers stuck out their tongues in defiance along the entire route, but the
pull of financial gain and human ingenuity overcame them. In one case,
workers laid tracks across the debris-covered ice of Allen Glacier for
five-and-one-half miles, according to my two sources for this column, The
Copper Spike by Lone Janson and Iron Rails to Alaskan Copper by Alfred
Quinn.

Two of the largest obstacles on the route were Miles and Childs glaciers,
both of which calve icebergs into the Copper River from opposite banks.
Erastus Hawkins, the engineer in charge of the railroad project, and Michael
Heney, the construction contractor, preferred to run the railroad alongside
the Copper River, but the Miles and Childs glaciers sprawl over both
shorelines at a pinch-point about 15 miles from the river¹s mouth. Not
listening to other engineers who thought the problem was insurmountable,
Hawkins designed a 1,550-foot steel bridge to span the Copper River at a
river bend between the two glaciers.

Geologists had found that the glaciers had fused during the past several
centuries, and the leader of a U.S. Army expedition up the Copper River in
1885 reported that the nose of Miles Glacier was then about 120 yards from
the site of the bridge. By 1908, both glaciers had receded to provide a gap
of about three miles.

Starting in April 1909, workers scrambled to complete the Million Dollar
Bridge, spurred on by a U.S. law that gave railroad developers four years to
complete a designated route. After four years, the government would tax them
$100 per operating mile per year. Contactors finished the bridge by
midsummer of 1910.

Soon after construction of the Million Dollar Bridge, which cost $1.4
million to build, the glaciers continued to threaten the railroad.

In August 1910, two glaciologists from the National Geographic Society
studied the sudden advances of both Miles and Childs glaciers. A northern
lobe of Childs Glacier began creeping toward the bridge in June, and by
August it was moving eight feet per day. On August 17, the 200-foot face of
the glacier was 1,624 feet away from the bridge.

Ralph Tarr, one of the glaciologists, speculated on what would happen if the
glacier continued to advance in 1911.

“It is absolutely certain that no corps of engineers could save the bridge
and railway if the glacier should advance that far,” he wrote.

Childs Glacier did not engulf the bridge, but the glacier crept to within
1,475 feet in June 1911. Childs and Miles glaciers have since retreated,
sparing the Million Dollar Bridge, which served the railway from 1910 until
1938, when low copper prices forced the shutdown of the Copper River and
Northwestern Railway. The bridge survived nature’s whims until March 23,
1964, when the Good Friday Earthquake knocked the northernmost span from its
concrete piling, a flaw that state workers repaired in 2005.

This column is provided as a public service by the Geophysical Institute,
University of Alaska Fairbanks, in cooperation with the UAF research
community. Ned Rozell is a science writer at the institute. This column
first appeared in 2002.

Ned Rozell
907-474-7468
1-4-12

In 1973, Elden Johnson was a young engineer with a job working on one of the most ambitious and uncertain projects in the world — an 800-mile steel pipeline that carried warm oil over frozen ground. Thirty-five years later, Johnson looked back at what he called “the greatest story ever told of man’s interaction with permafrost.”

The four-foot in diameter, half-inch-thick steel pipe had an original design lifespan of 30 years. The state of Alaska and the U.S. Department of the Interior not long ago the pipeline the green light for another 30 years of operation.

“It’s like a car,” said Johnson, who worked for Alyeska Pipeline Service Company for many years and now works for BP Exploration Alaska. “As long as you maintain it, it’ll continue to work.”

Permafrost, frozen ground that is a relic of the last ice age, exists beneath about 75 percent of the pipeline’s 800-mile route. When ice-rich permafrost thaws, the ground slumps, causing problems for structures above.

After the 1969 oil discovery at Prudhoe Bay, developers unfamiliar with Alaska wanted to bury the entire supply of Japanese-made pipe. But after a review by people who knew of the dangers of building on permafrost, a legion of workers constructed a pipeline that they buried for 380 miles and — in areas of permafrost — built above the ground on platforms for 420 miles.

The initial design was good, but not perfect, Johnson said. He remembered during construction when he and others were inspecting the ground from the Yukon River to Coldfoot, found unstable permafrost, and recommended that sections of the pipeline be re-designed. Instead of conventional buried pipeline, the engineers called for more-expensive and time-consumptive aboveground pipeline.

“We changed the design for at least 20 percent of that distance,” he said. “They were gut-wrenching decisions potentially impacting the startup schedule.”

The call to elevate more than half of the pipeline turned out to be a good one. Even though engineers bored holes in the ground about every 800 feet to check for permafrost, they didn’t find it all. When the pipeline was two years old in 1979, the pipe buckled and leaked in two buried sections because of thawed permafrost. In both cases, the pipeline, which carried oil that left the ground in Prudhoe Bay as warm as 145 degrees F, caused about four feet of settlement. Engineers fixed those and other problems, and the two leaks in 1979 are still the only spills caused by permafrost.

Alyeska Pipeline Service Co. workers check the pipeline each year for signs of settling and proper operation of the heat pipes that help keep the support posts of the above-ground pipeline anchored in frozen ground. The buried pipeline has in 31 years become more stable as the more rapid thawing of early years has settled down.

“The risk to the buried pipeline right now is becoming minimal,” Johnson said.

The pipeline has delivered more than 16 billion barrels of oil since its startup in June 1977, with two brief shutdowns due to permafrost problems.

Johnson estimated permafrost-related maintenance has totaled about 5-to-10 percent of the operating costs over the life of the pipeline. “It’s the cost of doing business in the Arctic,” he said.

This column is provided as a public service by the Geophysical Institute, University of Alaska Fairbanks, in cooperation with the UAF research community. Ned Rozell is a science writer at the institute. This column first appeared in 2008.

While running through Bicentennial Park in Anchorage, biologist Jessy Coltrane spotted a porcupine in a birch tree. On her runs on days following, she saw it again and again, in good weather and bad. Over time, she knew which Alaska creature she wanted to study.

“I thought, Oh my god, how does he do it? How does this animal make it through winter?’” Coltrane said during the December defense of her doctoral thesis in Fairbanks. “It would be 20 below out and he’s there eating (bark).”

Coltrane’s study has cast some midwinter light on the Alaska porcupine, perhaps the least-studied mammal in the state. She at first wanted to learn about what porcupines did in winter, but switched to studying the physiology of the quilled creature after the porcupines she watched hardly moved on their tree-limb perches. Winter porcupine behavior “doesn’t happen,” she joked at her defense.

But that lack of activity in a subarctic winter made porcupines more intriguing to her. The porcupine doesn’t avoid winter by hibernating like a bear, nor does it curl up in an earthen womb like the beaver (the only larger rodent in Alaska). She saw porcupines most often in trees, with no protection from the elements.

In designing her study, Coltrane mused about the challenges of an exposed life during an Alaska winter. Bitter air temperatures would probably require a porcupine to take in more calories, she thought. This seemed puzzling when a porcupine’s major food was to be the inner bark of white spruce trees and the tree’s bitter needles, rich with toxins that discourage most every other animal from chewing them.

To begin her study, she searched for detailed studies of far-north porcupines. She found none. With advice from biologists she respects, she set up her own study, installing radio collars on porcupines in the forests of Anchorage and with the help of her husband building pens for a few in Fairbanks. The captive porcupines helped her understand how they functioned on such a poor diet.

After a study that took her more than six years, Coltrane presented these porcupine insights during her thesis defense:

* Alaska porcupines are almost twice as large as Lower 48 porcupines.

* Porcupines in her study area didn’t “hibernate on the hoof” by lowering their body temperatures to save energy; whether it was 30 above or 30 below, porcupines (insulated by their quills and dense guard hairs) remained at about the same body temperature as a human’s.

*The porcupines in her study, each of which she named, ate a highly toxic winter diet that required lots of energy to process. They survived the winter by burning body fat and moving very little.

* Fifty percent of a porcupine’s weight in fall was in the form of fat. “That’s ridiculously fat,” Coltrane said. “Like a polar bear or a seal.”

* Despite eating low-protein foods in winter, porcupines did not lose lean tissue. They instead lost 30 percent of their fat reserves.

* More than 20 percent of their meager dietary intake was lost in their urine, most likely a result of ridding their bodies of toxins stored in spruce needles.

* Her Alaska porcupines had larger winter home ranges than did Lower 48 porcupines, and spent time in mixed hardwood and conifer forests.

* Porcupines she studied spent 79 percent of their time in and around white spruce trees, the rest of the time in birch. “(Eating) birch gives them a break from the toxins,” Coltrane said. “Maybe that’s why they prefer mixed forest.”

* After dealing with winter “for a ridiculous number of months,” Coltrane’s porcupines depleted their fat reserves. To survive, porcupines depend on nutritious springtime greenery, which must be indescribably delicious after months of nibbling bark and spruce needles.

This column is provided as a public service by the Geophysical Institute, at the University of Alaska Fairbanks in cooperation with the UAF research community.

Ned Rozell
907-474-7468
12/20/2011

Alfred Brooks was a geologist who traveled thousands of miles in Alaska and left his name on the state’s northernmost mountain range. Twenty years before his death in 1924, he also left behind a summary of what Alaska was like over a century ago, when “large areas (were) still practically unexplored.”

To see what Brooks had to say about the Alaska of 1906, I pulled a copy of his Geography and Geology of Alaska: A Summary of Existing Knowledge from a shelf of rare books in a Fairbanks library.

In his government report, Brooks pointed out misconceptions about Alaska that endure today. He wrote in his introduction:

“If facts are presented which may seem elementary, it is because even well-informed people have been known to harbor misconceptions in regard to the orographic features, climate, and general character of Alaska. Those who read about the perils and privations of winter travel and explorations are apt to picture a region of ice and snow; others, again, who have personal knowledge of the tourist route of southeastern Alaska, regard the whole district as one of rugged mountains and glaciers.”

In Brooks’ day, about 60,000 people lived in Alaska, yet they were scattered wider across the territory than people are today. The Klondike gold rush and the stampedes that followed had driven determined men to the far corners of Alaska.

“The more venturous prospector found no risk too hazardous, no difficulty too great, and now there is hardly a stream which has not been panned by him, and hardly a forest which has not resounded to the blows of his ax,” Brooks wrote. “Evidences of his presence are to be found from the almost tropical jungles of southeastern Alaska to the barren grounds of the north which skirt the Arctic Ocean.”

While today’s scientists can sometimes use satellites to gain information about Alaska without leaving their offices, Brooks and his contemporaries at the U.S. Geological Survey spent their entire summers on traverses of the land at the turn of the century. They performed their work without the help of the airplane, which had not yet been invented, nor the internal combustion engine.

Brooks wrote of an 1899 expedition he made with topographer William Peters to map the country from Lynn Canal near Haines west through the mountains of the St. Elias Range and northward through what is today Wrangell St. Elias National Park. They filled in a void in Alaska’s map until they reached the settlement of Fortymile on the Yukon River.

“The journey was made with horses, with only five out of the original 15 reaching the Yukon,” Brooks wrote.

Scientists of the USGS penetrated Alaska by following rivers and trekking overland and, when they could, mapped one-fifth of Alaska by 1904. Brooks attributed the agency’s success to its ability to choose a few good men.

“Of the twenty or more parties which the Geological Survey has sent to Alaska, hardly a single one has failed to execute the work allotted to it,” Brooks wrote. “This is largely because those who were entrusted with their leadership were specially fitted, by nature as well as by experience and training, for the undertaking. The parties have usually been made up of a few carefully chosen men, and the physical work and discomforts, as well as hardships, have been shared by leaders and men alike.”

Brooks, who later wrote about his personal experiences in Alaska, concluded his section on exploration of the territory in “Geography and Geology of Alaska” by addressing critics of government spending who had no idea of the hazards and difficulty of travel in Alaska.

“Alaskan surveys and explorations have never been and never will be easy,” Brooks wrote. “Throughout its history, the geographic investigation has been a tale of hardship and suffering and not infrequently of death. Let those who are not personally familiar with the character of the difficulties not judge it too harshly.”

This column is provided as a public service by the Geophysical Institute at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, in cooperation with the UAF research community.

Ned Rozell
907-474-7468
12/17/2011

For the thirteenth straight year, I’m happy to be spending one week of December here, at the Fall Meeting of the American Geophysical Union, where more than 15,000 scientists gather for a week to discuss the latest news of the world.

Here are a few items from the first two days:

Bering Glacier has stopped its rush: Alaska’s largest glacier, located near the hinge where Southeast Alaska connects to Southcentral Alaska, may have stopped surging. Bruce Molnia of the U.S. Geological Survey carried to the conference a satellite image of the glacier from one week ago. “I’m not going to say (the surge) is over, but the velocity is close to zero,” Molnia said in the Moscone Center. Alaska has a handful of glaciers that start to move relatively fast after periods of hardly moving at all. These surging glaciers are not growing glaciers, instead they transfer large amounts of their ice from one section to another all of a sudden, and then they slow down again.

Scientists noticed a lot of action one year ago, when glaciologist Chris Larsen announced at this meeting that the surge had completed a trip downglacier, expressing its movement by cracking up into crevasses where its tongue enters Vitus Lake. Bering Glacier was also quite active in early 2011, Molnia said. “It advanced about (60 feet) per day in January and then slowed to about (45 feet) per day in June,” he said. But the latest satellite imagery showed that its tongue seemed to be retreating, and other parts of the glacier he saw through the clouds were smooth rather than cracked up. When Molnia visited the glacier in summer 2011, he noticed crevasses 120 feet across and 300 feet deep, indicative that the surge was then quite active. “They were gigantic,” he said.

Voyager spacecraft is 11 billion miles from home: Launched in 1977, the Voyager 1 spacecraft is still communicating with Earth, even as it appears to have left our solar system. The 1,592-pound probe, which along with its sophisticated instruments carries a disc with recordings of a baby crying, whale songs and Mozart, is the farthest manmade thing from Earth. Eighty-four-year-old Eugene Parker, who in 1958 described the solar wind that Voyager appears to have just outrun, spoke at a press conference on the subject. “It’s been a long journey with a lot of clever scientific interpretation along the way,” he said of the spacecraft that has power to keep its instruments functioning until 2020. “We’ll all be sitting around holding our breath waiting for the next surprise. To me, it’s been constant entertainment . . . Nature tends to be much more creative than our own minds.”

Nothing compares to knowledge when tsunamis strike: During one of several press conferences on the world’s most destructive geologic event in 2011. “The March 11 earthquake and tsunami off the east coast of Japan,” Costas Sanolakis said. Public education and preparedness is the only thing that worked” to save lives. Sanolakis, of the Hellenic Center of Marine Research in Greece and the University of Southern California, is part of an international group of scientists who travel wherever a devastating tsunami hits. Expensive infrastructure isn’t always effective, he said. He showed images of a breakwater off the coast of a Japan town that cost $1.6 billion to build but did little to deflect the tsunami, and a “tsunami forest” of pines that had been planted in a vulnerable village. The tsunami reduced the forest to one tree. The researcher also pointed out that about 10 percent of people within the reach of the Japan tsunami died, compared to 90 percent in Banda Aceh, Indonesia, during the 2004 tsunami. Sanolakis said more people in Japan survived because more knew what a tsunami was and where to evacuate in the few minutes of warning they had.

This column is provided as a public service by the Geophysical Institute at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, in cooperation with the UAF research community.

Ned Rozell
907-474-7468
12/2/2011

Some places in this world are just too dirty, dull or dangerous for human pilots to fly. An airspace in the latter category is anywhere near gas flares in Alaska’s oilfields. With only a few seconds of warning, flames blast high in the air from a network of pipes, releasing the stress of sucking oil from deep in the ground.

Greg Walker recently found himself taking a look these fire-breathing nozzles near Prudhoe Bay, but he was barely close enough to see them from where he stood. He instead watched a “flying king crab” that buzzed around flaming flare heads 50 feet above the ground. The 2.5-pound flying machine captured video and five-megapixel images of the flares and their support pipes, some of them jacked by frost and needing repair.

Walker’s mission was to help oil-company workers for BP order expensive parts they need to replace during scheduled maintenance next summer. He used one of BP’s Aeryon Scouts, a four-propeller flying machine BP had purchased for use on the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. BP collaborated with Walker and his team because they are experts on operating unmanned aerial vehicles.

As the manager of Poker Flat Research Range, part of University of Alaska Fairbanks Geophysical Institute, Walker is assembling a fleet of these tools in an enterprise that makes he and his team very busy.

After visiting Prudhoe Bay to inspect BP’s flares, Walker was off to Kodiak to fly the Scout over the shoreline. He wants to use the flyers to see how harbor seals react to launches from a rocket facility on Kodiak Island. This is after a summer in which he and his crew traveled to Prince William Sound to test the Scout’s ability to buzz over beaches to help crews plan oil spill cleanups, and out to Dutch Harbor to see how effective a larger, fixed-wing flying machine was for mapping gatherings of Steller sea lions.

The unmanned aerial vehicle business is on the rise in Alaska, as more agencies come to UAF to work with Walker and his crew at Poker Flat. The university now owns nine Scan Eagles, 40-pound aircraft the size of California condors, that the crew has used to map the boundaries of smoky wildfires and to count seals in the Bering Sea, two of the lunar-lander type Scouts, two similar models with more propellers than the Scouts, and three smaller aircraft launched by catapult.

Two summers ago, Walker and Don Hampton spent a month aboard a ship with biologists who were looking for seals that live on and around the northern ice. Walker and Hampton flew missions with a camera they installed in the aircraft’s nose. The camera captured more than 25,000 images, often on days that featured crummy weather, which underscored the Alaska niche for unmanned aerial vehicles.

“It’s hazardous to put humans out there,” Walker said. “If you’re out there (in a small airplane or helicopter) hundreds of miles from land, 400 feet altitude, if you have any problems at all, you’re dead.”

Walker, who ran his own company that designed and made control systems for unmanned aircraft before coming to Alaska in 1998, said the opportunities keep coming for his team, which includes Hampton, David Giessel, Kathe Rich, Ro Bailey and Jeff Rothman. During the next couple of years they will use unmanned flying machines to help sea-ice researchers, to sample volcanic ash and to monitor endangered Steller sea lions in the western Aleutians.

“The more you show the capability of these things, the more people come up with needs for them,” Walker said.

This column is provided as a public service by the Geophysical Institute at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, in cooperation with the UAF research community.