Ned Rozell
474-7468
October 19, 2010

Twenty-eight years after scientists spilled hundreds of plastic disks on ice in the Beaufort Sea north of Alaska to determine ocean currents, another one came home to roost at the Geophysical Institute at the University of Alaska Fairbanks.

In the summer of 2007, graduate student Nathan Coutsoubos of UAF’s Resilience and Adaptation Program found a yellow plastic disk on the tundra in Barrow, just 60 feet from a salt-water lagoon. He picked up the disk and saw a printed message: One Dollar Reward on Return of Serial Number with Date Found, Location, Your Name and Address to Geophysical Institute, Univ. of Alaska, Fairbanks.

Coutsoubos, who was studying shorebirds on the North Slope, brought the disk back to Fairbanks, where he returned it to Roberta Greenlee of the Geophysical Institute’s Business Office. Greenlee has handed out these dollars for years, but not since 1998, when two brothers in Scotland returned a disk they had found in the rocks there.

In 1979, scientists scattered 1,500 of the seven-inch disks on the sea ice around Prudhoe Bay to see how oil spilled there might drift. Researchers involved with the project wrote up the final report long ago after people found hundreds of disks in North Slope villages and collected their dollars, but a few of the disks endure.

The 1979 experiment wasn’t the first time scientists dropped things in Alaska waters that they hoped others would find. From 1956 to 1959, Canadian scientists stuffed messages into 19,000 12-ounce brown beer bottles and set them adrift in the Gulf of Alaska. In the notes, they asked the finders to tell them where they picked the bottles up, so they could better understand ocean currents. The last published report of a message-in-a-bottle find was in 1972.

Today, scientists use floating buoys, computer models, satellites, and other high-tech methods to learn more about ocean currents, but researchers still get a lot of information from objects floating on the ocean, many of them as a result of shipping accidents.

Dean Orbison of Sitka and his son Tyler have gained a bit of fame among beachcombers for their collection of 130 floating plastic turtles, ducks, beavers, and frogs that are a subset of 28,800 bath toys that fell off a ship in the North Pacific in January 1992. According to Seattle oceanographer Curtis Ebbesmeyer, the Orbison’s bath toys were caught up in the Pacific Subarctic Gyre, a counterclockwise circulation of water that extends from the southern coast of Alaska to Kamchatka in Russia. Objects floating in the gyre make complete tours of the North Pacific about every three years, Ebbesmeyer wrote in an article in EOS, a publication of the American Geophysical Union.

Dean Orbison said his records of when he picked up the bath toys, confirmed by entries in his boat log, support the theory that the toys are riding the Subarctic Gyre. Dean and Tyler do much of their beachcombing based off their 38-foot boat, The Prost. The Orbisons’ favorite items to find are glass floats formerly used on nets by Japanese fishermen, which are getting more rare, unlike some plastic items. “The single biggest item we’ve found in the last five years is plastic water bottles,” Orbison said.

Plastic is all over the world’s oceans. In 2000, a researcher in Hawaii picked apart the regurgitated pellets of 144 albatrosses and found plastic in every single one. Sun breaks plastic down to a small extent, but the floating toys and other items will never completely disappear. “Ultimately, the toys will return to dust,” wrote Ebbesmeyer in his Beachcombers Alert! newsletter, “joining the scum of plastic powder (that) rides the global ocean.”

Marmian Grimes
907-474-7902
10/15/10

Seifert takes new sustainability role within Cooperative Extension Service
Rich Seifert, the longtime “energy guy” for the UAF Cooperative Extension Service, has a new role as community sustainability coordinator for Extension. Seifert will help Alaska communities become as self-sufficient as possible and will work to meet the needs for increasing energy, food and health security. Seifert and Extension will provide the link between the university and communities that need current, research-based information in these areas. He will also work with existing community sustainability organizations in all regions of the state and provide opportunities for them to share information. Seifert served as Extension’s energy specialist for 28 years, and retired from the university June 30. He began his new position Sept. 9 but will continue some of his energy education work until a replacement is hired. Seifert is available at 907-474-7201 or by e-mail at [email protected].

Boyer named head of Center for Alaska Native Health Research
Bert Boyer has been named director for the Center for Alaska Native Health Research, part of the Institute of Arctic Biology at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. Boyer has been serving as acting director since February, when CANHR director Gerald Mohatt died. Boyer, who was the center’s co-founder along with Mohatt, is the principal investigator of several CANHR genetics studies. Boyer is a professor of biochemistry and molecular biology. He will give an overview of CANHR at the Alaska Federation of Natives at 10:25 a.m. on Friday, Oct. 22.

New librarian takes helm at Geophysical Institute’s Keith B. Mather Library
Former Vassar College science librarian Flora Grabowska was recently named the new librarian and research assistant professor at the Keith B. Mather Library at the UAF Geophysical Institute. At Vassar, Grabowska was a strong proponent of open access, which is a move to provide scientists, teachers, students and the public free and unrestricted use of research published in scholarly journals. Before earning her master’s degree in library science in 1981, Grabowska was a scientist herself. She worked in biochemistry at the University of British Columbia and at the Macaulay Institute for Soil Research in the United Kingdom. The Keith B. Mather Library is the most northern special library in the Unites States. The library has a number of special collections, including the largest aurora collection in the country. Although the library supports the GI and IARC, it’s open to the public Monday through Friday, 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. The library is located in Room 202 of the Akasofu Building on UAF’s West Ridge.

UAF Alumni Association elects board members, officers
This spring, the University of Alaska Fairbanks Alumni Association elected several new board members and officers. New board members include Jim Dixon of Fairbanks, Dani Carlson of Fairbanks, Sam Enoka of San Francisco and Tania Clucas of Fairbanks. During the meeting, the board elected new officers, including Randy Pitney of Fairbanks, president; Dan Flodin of Chugiak, vice president; DeShana York of Anchorage, secretary; and Derek Miller of Fairbanks, treasurer.

MLG/10-15-10/074brfs-11

Ned Rozell
907-474-7468
10/7/10

Keith Echelmeyer has died at age 56. The glaciologist, pilot, mountaineer and fighter for life passed away last Saturday, with his incomparable wife Susan Campbell by his side and chickadees at the feeder just outside his window.

His death from a brain tumor was not a surprise, but his enduring it for eight years was. Keith did some impressive science in his two decades at the Geophysical Institute at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. He figured out baffling complexities of ice streams in Antarctica, worked on the fastest flowing glacier in the world in Greenland years before it became big news, and outfitted his single-engine Piper PA-12 with a laser rangefinding system that allowed his team to measure staggering ice loss on Alaska glaciers.

In 2002, after Keith flew his plane from Fairbanks to Yakutat for a conference he helped organize, he suffered violent seizures and was medevaced to Providence Alaska Medical Center in Anchorage. There, he learned he had a brain tumor. Keith, with the help of Susan and a team of doctors from the Fairbanks area and Duke University, fought that tumor for eight years. In that time, he still managed to do things he should not have been able to do, such as walk, ski, and go on two-week backpacking trips in his beloved Brooks Range.

Susan was with him for the small victories and the crushing setbacks. In the end, she turned their home into a place of light, with a constant stream of friends and an uplifting air of gratitude. People often left their home with the unexpected sensation of feeling happy.

Here are some reflections from a small sample of Keith’s friends, some who were also his colleagues: Carl Benson, professor emeritus and glaciologist at the Geophysical Institute: “He was a very good pilot. He was good at glaciology. He was very good at interpreting geologic features on the face of the Earth. He was a very good writer, one of the people you could count on to edit things, and he was incredibly strong. His physical strength and mental ability all came together to make quite a guy.”

Roman Motyka, GI glaciologist: “He had this childlike curiosity about everything. He had no hesitation at all about asking questions. (His sickness) could have crushed him, but instead he went in the other direction. Once he accepted it, he opened up his heart. I’m working in Greenland, and I keep going back to his papers, what he did in 1985 and 1986. Keith’s going to keep popping up in my life.”

Will Harrison, GI professor emeritus and glaciologist: “I used to kid him about how many grad. students’ careers he destroyed. Because your normal grad. student thought he could take Keith as a model and succeed. But not many people can do what he did (the mountaineering trips every weekend, flying his airplane) and succeed professionally. He had two lives, the adventure life and the professional one, and he was able to sustain both, which is saying a lot about human energy and capability.”

Geologist and pilot Richard Flanders: “He’s done walking trips in the Brooks Range most people would write books about. He never believed in writing articles. He did it because he liked to do it. He was arrogant to some degree, but mostly he was impatient with people who didn’t think they could do something. He just didn’t think he had any limits. He was a driven person, and (his sickness) was another mountain to climb. He wouldn’t sit back and let it take him. Just last spring he split all the wood I put in his driveway.”

Geologist and mountaineer Jeff Benowitz: “He climbed iconic peaks in all of the (mountain) ranges. The Cassin (Ridge, on Denali), the west face of Deborah, Doonerak, and he climbed peaks nobody ever heard of and he never felt the need to tell anybody about it.”

Chris Larsen, GI glaciologist: “He would always do surveying (turning metal knobs on a theodolite) barehanded in the wind. Everyone writing notes next to him would freeze their hands. Somehow, he could just say ‘My hands aren’t going to get cold.’ Luke Skywalker had the Force. Keith had that. Don’t worry about how it’s getting done. Just do it. Keith was amazingly frugal (with projects such as mounting a laser-altimetry unit on his own aircraft to determine glacier shrinkage). He did a real service to science by keeping things cheap. He had that mountaineering mentality: efficient, small and fast.”

Anthony Arendt, GI glaciologist: “He was really pioneering new stuff. GPS was in its infancy but he still made it work (in the laser-altimetry program). That unique combination of his science skills and his flying skills was really valuable. He had this fearlessness. Even though you don¹t know how to do something, you go out and figure it out. So many people with that powerful of a mind, all they do are academics. But for Keith, it was equally important to get outside and explore the wilderness.”

John Carlson, principal of the Watershed School in Fairbanks and Keith’s partner on an Alaska Mountain Wilderness Classic Ski Race from Nabesna to McCarthy: “He had this incredible awareness of the lay of the land. He¹d just glance at the topo. map and find the route. We never veered out of our way. I had just come off all that ultra (marathon) running and thought I was a stud, and he just buried me, day after day. He was just this dot up ahead on the landscape.”

Martin Truffer, GI glaciologist: “He’d be in the office doing high-level science and then he goes out and does the first winter ascent of Doonerak (a mountain in the Brooks Range). He just managed to do everything. He had a connection to wild places that not a lot of people have. He really needed to be out there. The way he dealt with getting sick was that same character, the one that perseveres against reason. He mentally never gave up. He really fought this to the bitter end. But the graceful thing about (his death) was not to fight with every technological means available. That’s the most inspiring thing, even when he couldn’t talk, he showed his appreciation of people, maybe like never before. A lot of people lead their lives as different people because of Keith, and that’s something.” (Truffer took up flying soon after Keith became ill). “There was nothing average about Keith, ever. Even his singing and handwriting were exceptionally bad.”

Jon Miller, Keith’s climbing partner: “(On the approach to the first winter ascent of Mount Doonerak) one of our skis hit a freshly gnawed ram skull, and then we saw wolves, which were sort of a totem animal for Keith. Then 200 ptarmigan sailed away through this rosy light. He loved that stuff as much as a well-climbed pitch. As remarkable as (the time was before Keith was sick), the latter part of his life eclipses it for strength, endurance, and generosity. When he got sick, he started patching that hole (his strong personality traits that sometimes made him hard on others). He developed a generosity of spirit. He really brought people he had alienated back to him. The illness was tragic, but what (Keith and Susan) have done with it was very beautiful and inspiring. It wouldn’t have been that way if he hadn’t had that incredible strength, and those weaknesses too. Susan is every bit as strong as Keith is. He had so much taken away from him, and he continued to powerfully, cheerfully persevere. He’s an incredible role model for all the adversity we¹re going to face in life. Both he and Susan gave us a road map.”

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.

By Ned Rozell
907-474-7468
9/30/10

At the end of this century, more graceful white bodies of migrating trumpeter swans will glide over Alaska. Alpine

slopes will be quieter, with less piercing whistles from the Alaska marmot. Caribou will find fewer patches of tasty lichen and other favorite foods. A lanky grass will invade the Seward Peninsula and explode along Alaska’s road system. This may be the Alaska of 2099.

Or it may not.

However, this is the best-guess scenario of researchers who used climate models and all the relevant information they could find to predict the future of Alaska landscapes, how the state’s ecosystems may change, and how all that could affect four different species in Alaska. Karen Murphy and John Morton of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the University of Alaska Fairbanks’ Nancy Fresco and Falk Huettmann compiled the report with the help of many others.

The team used data from Alaska weather stations to prime the best computer models representing climate. The data was combined with the knowledge of scientists with years of field experience. Murphy, Morton, Fresco and Huettmann chose to look at caribou because those animals exist all over the state and so many people depend upon them for food; Alaska marmots because they can probably thrive nowhere else but their high-country habitats in Alaska; trumpeter swans because they are a migratory bird that can choose their own places to nest based in part on ice-free days; and reed canary grass because it is an invasive weed species that already has a toehold on the Kenai Peninsula.

With many cautionary notes in their report about the reliability of attempting to predict the future with computer models (which is problematic, just ask your weatherman), the researchers drew maps showing the predicted future ranges of caribou, Alaska marmots, trumpeter swans and reed canary grass.

Their predictions for 2090-2099 show less ideal Alaska habitat for the Alaska marmot and caribou, and more for trumpeter swans and reed canary grass. The report is for “anyone who has to make decisions about long-range management planning, primarily land managers,” said Fresco, network coordinator of the Scenarios Network for Alaska Planning at UAF.

She advised against people taking the predictions as the way things are going to be.  ”It was the best we could do given the data at the time,” she said. “All the projections have to be taken with all the caveats. These are possible scenarios, but we’re not trying to lock ourselves into saying it’s going to happen this way or that way.”

The report, “Connecting Alaska Landscapes into the Future,” is more of a new way to look at things than a management tool, said Tom Paragi, a wildlife biologist with the Alaska Department of Fish and Game who helped group members compile information about caribou.  ”It’s a way to test hypotheses,” he said. “In the next 10 to 20 years, let’s see if there’s evidence of change toward these scenarios . . . It’s a different way of thinking long-term, but it’s nothing we take and run with right now.”

Fresco said group members are now working on more detailed reports for both Alaska and Canada.  ”We’re trying to do more of the same with better and more data,” she said, adding that even though the projections aren’t perfect, they might inspire people to look ahead.  ”All planning involves uncertainty,” she said. “Using uncertainty as an excuse to avoid thinking about the future is not usually the best option.”

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.

Amy Hartley
907-474-5823
9/23/10

The United States Navy has awarded the University of Alaska Fairbanks up to $47 million to test and evaluate payloads aboard small, unmanned aircraft.

The UA Unmanned Aircraft Program, part of the UAF Geophysical Institute, will lead the research. The program will test unmanned aircraft and how they perform in harsh conditions. In addition, they will evaluate payloads, which are packages of data-collection instruments carried on the aircraft.

The program currently has a fleet of four unmanned aerial systems. Each weighs about 40 pounds and has a wingspan of 10 feet. The aircraft are Insitu ScanEagles — relatively compact models — that can fly more than 20 hours at a time, boosting their versatility for working in remote and often extreme conditions. The fleet will soon expand in size and diversity, adding new models of aircraft that are both larger and smaller than the ScanEagles.

Having performed flights based aboard ships in the Bering Sea and flying the ScanEagles through dense wildfire smoke blanketing Interior Alaska, the UA Unmanned Aircraft Program has a demonstrated history of operating systems in less-than-ideal conditions. In addition, the program has maneuvered through the complex web of policies and permits needed for flying unmanned aerial systems through various types of airspace.

This experience was key to landing the Navy contract, said Greg Walker, manager of the UA Unmanned Aircraft Program. “The Navy was looking for proven performance and we believe our experiences in harsh environments secured this award.”

To boost the program’s ability to meet a broad spectrum of challenges, the program has partnered with 27 industry leaders, including large corporations, small businesses, not-for-profit corporations and other universities. The diversity achieved by so many partners allows the team to address a multitude of research scenarios the Navy could assign as part of the contract.

“With well over 400 years of combined experience, the University of Alaska team has an understanding of today’s challenges facing unmanned aerial system platform and payload use and development,” Walker said. “With the historical knowledge and direct experience, our team is thoroughly familiar with safety, technical, and risk challenges and airspace usage.”

The University of Alaska Unmanned Aircraft Program was created in 2006. The program’s fleet is based at Poker Flat Research Range, located north of Fairbanks on the Steese Highway.

ADDITIONAL CONTACTS: Greg Walker, UA Unmanned Aircraft Program manager, 907-455-2102, or [email protected]. Marmian Grimes, UAF public information officer, at 907-474-7902 or [email protected].

AH/9-23-10/053-11

Ned Rozell
474-7468
9/22/10

Attracted by some of the smallest creatures in Alaska, dozens of the state’s largest gathered last week off Point Barrow. Bowhead whales in groups of almost 100 were grouped a few tens of miles from Barrow to take advantage of one of the richest whale feeding hotspots off the coast of Alaska. Steve Okkonen was there to see them in the shallow waters above the continental shelf north of Barrow.

“The whales we saw Friday and Saturday were in eight meters of water,” said Okkonen, a research associate professor with the University of Alaska Fairbanks School of Fisheries and Ocean Sciences. “That’s an eight-meter (-long) animal in eight meters of water, sometimes up to a 15-meter animal in eight meters of water.” The creatures, weighing more than 100 bull moose, were congregating off Point Barrow because of a staggering concentration of one of their favorite foods, krill.

Krill, shrimplike organism about an inch long, are so small it would take a few hundred to fill a cereal bowl. Okkonen and researchers from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, the University of Rhode Island, the North Slope Borough and others are studying the Barrow whale-feeding hotspot to determine how unique and important it is, a question developers will be forced to ponder when considering which areas to alter in the search for oil and gas.

From the Annika Marie, a 43-foot research ship, Okkonen and his colleagues witnessed a phenomenon common offshore of Barrow in the fall. Strong east winds help create a current that forces krill toward the shallow continental shelf from the depths of the Beaufort Sea. These east winds also push the krill-infested waters westward along the Beaufort coast toward Point Barrow. When the east winds settle down, another current flowing northeastward up the Chukchi Sea coast acts as a wall. “The krill will tend to stack up,” Okkonen said. Sometimes swimming in an echelon formation reminiscent of migrating geese, bowhead whales plow through the stacks of krill, filling their bathtub-size bellies with tens of thousands. Okkonen and his coworkers want to find out how the Barrow hotspot compares to other great feeding areas along the whales’ annual migratory path through cold northern waters. Bowheads spend their entire lives in the Bering, Chukchi, and Beaufort seas.

“In Alaska (the Point Barrow area) is the hotspot, but how important is that spot?” Okkonen asked, adding that areas off Camp Simpson and Kaktovik are also productive for whales. “We also want to find out if krill overwinter (off Point Barrow after the sea ice forms).”

Point Barrow is an important place for bowhead whales, which pass it during spring as they move from the northern Bering Sea to where they spend their summers in the Canadian arctic. Barrow-area Natives have harvested bowheads in both spring and fall for thousands of years.

Researchers including Okkonen wrote a paper detailing the Barrow hotspot and the prevalence of bowheads in the June 2010 issue of Arctic. Here is their conclusion: “Because . . . whales appear to persist despite ongoing climate variability, the fall whale harvest by the Inupiat community at Barrow should be relatively resilient to climate change. The whale harvest at Barrow could, however, be particularly vulnerable to anthropogenic activities such as ship traffic, oil development, or an oil spill.”

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.

Amy Hartley
907-474-5823
9/17/10

The Keith B. Mather Library at the University of Alaska Fairbanks’ Geophysical Institute now houses the state’s only Patent and Trademark Depository Library.

As such, the Mather Library is designated by the U.S. Patent and Trademark office to receive and house copies of U.S. patent and trademark materials, make those materials available to the public and disseminate patent and trademark information. Library staff can assist community members by conducting searches of existing patents and trademarks and provide resources for registering new trademarks and applying for patents. Read the rest of this entry »

Ned Rozell
474-7468
9/16/10

On or within a few days of September 15, sea ice experts will make the call declaring that sea ice floating on northern oceans is covering its least amount of ocean surface in 2010.

The great northern winter is about to begin, and sea ice will soon be growing instead of shrinking. “It’s the turn of a new season, like the beginning of a new semester,” said Mark Serreze, director of the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Col.

Serreze estimated that 2010 would rank third on the list of years with the lowest sea ice extent at the end of the northern summer. Since the satellite era allowed a view from above since the late 1970s, the technology has show that 2007 was the record low year of sea-ice extent, followed by 2008 and 2010. Last fall, the arctic sea ice was a bit more widespread than this year. “The four lowest extents in September have been in the past four years,” Serreze said.

This year might have been a good one to attempt to sail through the Northwest Passage, a feat first completed by Norwegian Roald Amundsen in the early 1900s. “The Northwest Passage has been navigable in the past, but it’s fairly unusual this year,” said Jenny Hutchings of the International Arctic Research Center at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. “There’s a large area of open water in the Beaufort and Chukchi seas, and north of Svalbard there’s lower ice concentration than normal. Icebreakers have been getting pretty far north this year.”

“The northern route is really open this year,” Serreze said, referring to a somewhat clear big-ship pathway including McClure Strait north of Banks Island in arctic Canada. “The last time we saw that was in 2007. You could, in a sense, circumnavigate the Arctic right now . . . But only for a few more weeks.”

Though it may be a bit easier now then when Amundsen took several years to navigate the route, sailing the Northwest Passage is still an adventure, Serreze said. “We’re still talking about dangerous waters up there,” Serreze said. “It’s not like you’re going to take a cruise ship up there at 15 knots. “Even a little ice could be a problem,” he said. “A vessel hitting a three-meter chunk of sea ice would sustain a lot of damage.”

Due to the northern portion of the planet’s nod away from the sun, sea ice will soon feed on cold air, and close for another year the hazardous pathways of late summer. Sea ice will grow throughout autumn and winter, reaching its maximum in about the middle of March, when the sun will again gain a foothold in the North.

Serreze expects northern sea ice to continue its decline. With less sea ice, open ocean will absorb more of the sun’s energy and the far north will retain more heat. “(Fading sea ice) is contributing quite strongly to arctic warming,” Serreze 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.

Ned Rozell
9/2/10

474-7468

On a recent expedition to Alaska’s Quartz Lake, four-year-old visitor to Alaska Garrett Ast plucked a caterpillar from a twig. As Garrett held it in his palm, the caterpillar reared up and (with two sparkling baby blues) looked him right in the eye. Upon closer inspection, my nephew saw that, though striking; the caterpillar’s eyes weren’t real. So was born the question of why a caterpillar might invest energy in producing a set of fake eyes.

A little investigation led to a science research paper with one of the best examples of a first paragraph in its genre:  ”You are a 12-gram, insectivorous, tropical rainforest bird, foraging in shady, tangled, dappled, rustling foliage where edible caterpillars and other insects are likely to shelter. You want to live 10-20 years. You are peering under leaves, poking into rolled ones, searching around stems, exploring bark crevices and other insect hiding places. Abruptly an eye appears, 1-5 centimeters from your bill. If you pause a millisecond to ask whether that eye belongs to acceptable prey or to a predator, you are likely to be (and it takes only once) someone’s breakfast. Your innate reaction to the eye must be instant flight.”

John Burns of the Smithsonian Institution helped craft that sentence as one of three authors of  ”A tropical horde of counterfeit predator eyes,” which appeared this summer in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Burns and his coauthors posted excellent photos of more than two-dozen tropical caterpillars with elaborate false eyes.

The caterpillars probably evolved those false eyes to mimic snakes, lizards, small mammals and other things that eat little birds. But wait a second; there are no snakes or lizards in Alaska. Why would an Alaska caterpillar with aspirations of turning into a swallowtail butterfly pose as a reptile? I sent the photo to Burns, and to Derek Sikes, curator of entomology at the University of Alaska Museum of the North.

“Birds learn about snakes when they migrate (to the tropics and other places warm enough for snakes), so the snakes don’t have to be here for the mimicry to work. Nice, eh?” Sikes wrote in an e-mail. Burns said even the rugged birds that don’t flee Alaska for the winter might have the image of a snake wired deep within their tiny brains, even though they will never see one.

“Despite the lack of snakes in Alaska, a small insectivorous bird might still be genetically programmed to retreat when abruptly confronted at close range by the caterpillar’s eyes,’ owing to the bird’s evolutionary ancestry,” Burns wrote. “A resident bird species (like a chickadee or redpoll) might have descended in the not-too-distant past from a species that spends much of its life in a tropical environment where selection would directly preserve such behavior.”

* * * University of Alaska Fairbanks Research Forester Tom Malone sent me a message regarding the dryness of firewood, the subject of a recent column. He calculates that cords of dry aspen and birch weigh 1,000 pounds less than the same wood in wet or green condition. Aspen with 60 percent or greater moisture weighs about 3,870 pounds per cord, compared to 2,340 pounds when the same wood is dried to 20 percent or less moisture. A cord of wet birch weighs 4,500 pounds wet, compared to 3,420 pounds dry. A green cord of spruce weighs in at 3,060 pounds, compared to 2,520 pounds dry. An average cord of mixed firewood produces about 20 million British thermal units, Malone figures, while the same wood in its green condition gives off just 9 million Btu. If your house needs 230 million Btu of firewood heat per year, you could satisfy that with either 10 cords of dry birch or 20 cords of wet birch. Those employing the latter option would have carried 27.9 extra tons into the house, in addition to paying for twice as much wood.

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.

Ned Rozell
8/25/2010
474-7468

When Syun-Ichi Akasofu first approached Ted Stevens, the Japanese-American leader of the University of Alaska Fairbanks’ Geophysical Institute was desperate — he had responsibility for a rocket range that the Occupational Safety and Health Administration was ready to close, and he needed money for improvements.

Akasofu traveled to Washington, D.C., to meet the powerhouse Alaska senator. When Akasofu reached Stevens’ office, the senator informed him that he needed to head to Capitol Hill. “Can I come with you?” Akasofu asked. “I don’t see why not,” Stevens said. On the brief train ride, Akasofu pled his case for funds that would allow improvements to the rocket range his institute and the university had no money for. Stevens listened to him and deemed Akasofu’s cause important enough to turn around. “Let’s go back to the office right now,” Stevens said. The men caught a train going the other way.
Read the rest of this entry »