Ned Rozell
907-474-7468
10/13/2011

As Alaska cools and hardens, many scientists are reacquainting themselves with their offices. Such is the case for Derek Sikes, the curator of insects at the University of Alaska Museum of the North. This summer, he traveled across Alaska, from Sagwon Bluffs to Sitka and many places between, including a trip to the Aleutians for good lateral coverage.

Sikes’ tales of his recent insect explorations in Alaska have a Lewis and Clark feel. Scientists have inventoried the insects of Alaska for a long time, but those men and women were very few compared to the researchers studying caribou or the aurora. Because of this dearth of people looking for bugs, Alaska’s rock crevices and tidal splash zones still hide plenty of undiscovered species. Sikes and his colleagues have added more than 1,000 to the Alaska list of insects (and have collected 20 that are new to science) since he moved northward and started work at the museum four years ago. During the short period when insects are crawling, flying and hopping, he jumps at every opportunity to find more.

Sikes’ summer of 2011 began with an ant road trip. His friend, North Carolina State University biology professor and natural history book author Rob Dunn, sponsored a trip around the state to duplicate an expedition an ant researcher made around in Alaska 30 years ago.

Sikes was out to sample the state of the state’s ants in 2011. In following the path driven by the ant collector three decades ago, Sikes ventured about as far north as he could, bumping along the Dalton Highway to Sagwon Bluffs, about 60 miles shy of the Arctic Ocean. He found no ants there, but after flipping about 200 rocks at Happy Valley camp a few miles farther south, he found a nest wriggling with activity, and then another. He uncovered more ant nests beneath south-facing rocks near Toolik Lake. With help from ant-seeking volunteers who work at the UA Museum, Sikes was able to find about 30 species as he duplicated the travels of the biologist of the 1980s, from Sagwon Bluffs down to the Kenai Peninsula.

“We found ants everywhere he found them,” Sikes said. “We want to know if any species are extending their ranges northward.”

As with all his summer insect gatherings, Sikes and the people in his lab won’t know what they’ve found until they sit down and sort out the tiny bodies carried back to Fairbanks.

Not long after the ant road trip, Sikes caught a plane for Adak and then boarded a ship to Kasatochi, in the middle of the Aleutian Islands.

Kasatochi blew up in 2008, morphing from a green seabird paradise to a gray pile of mud and ash. Sikes had the good fortune of spending a day on the island on year before it erupted, and he has returned the three summers since to observe how insects repopulate an earthen moonscape.

During three days on the donut-shaped island with a crater at its center, Sikes found and collected 25 species of insects, up from 18 the year before. He discovered lots of midges that eat algae and a predatory fly that is now near the top of the Kasatochi food chain.

He also carried home a sample of plant roots and stems that the eruption buried three years ago. At home, he stuffed the vegetation in a Berlese funnel, a device that uses heat to drive living things out of soil and plant matter. He was expecting nothing, but witnessed the emergence of two springtails and a mite. Sikes was shocked.

He still questions whether the tiny creatures survived the eruption and three years without food, water or oxygen.

“It’s one of those extraordinary discoveries that requires extraordinary evidence,” he said. “But, then, springtails are some of the most indestructible creatures on Earth. They can be frozen, and they can live through dehydration. They are the ones who would survive something like this.”

From the Aleutian Islands (which, as far as anyone knows, do not host a single ant), Sikes made a few trips to Southeast Alaska. One was to the high country of Dall Island, where he found Alaska’s first example of a primeval wingless insect known as a Dipluran. After that, he traveled to Sitka for a conference and beach combed for intertidal insects in his down time.

Down time is something Sikes now has, since Alaska’s insects are either frozen or are employing their own antifreeze or freeze-tolerant strategies to bide their time. They wait in silence until the sun will once again circle the northern horizon. Then, when the soft tundra is humming with wingbeats, Derek Sikes will again be on his knees, turning over rocks somewhere in the wilds of Alaska.

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
10/6/2011

Beneath a sky of stars and hazy aurora, the heat of an October day shimmers upward. The next morning, leaves, moss and tundra plants are woven into a carpet of white frost; a skin of ice creeps over the surface of lakes. Alaska is freezing once again, responding to the planet’s nod away from the sun and signaling one of the biggest changes of the year.

Northern plants in these parts are standing at the ready, prepared for a long season of doing nothing. Deciduous trees have dropped their leaves, some of them gambling to retain their solar panels a few days longer than others. In a bipolar cycle of life, northern trees are shutting down the frenetic photosynthesis and growth of summer.

Most every migratory songbird has for the final time leapt from the branches here, though some wayward juncos will linger at great peril. The only migrants still passing overhead are the large-bodied swans. Those symbols of quiet grace are passing over in formations that resemble arrowheads arcing toward warm air.

Though a few cold-hardened spiders still creep along the forest floor, winged insects have vacated Alaska airspace. Mosquitoes have mostly died, leaving their eggs, now hard in puddles, as proof they once were here. Some adult mosquitoes stopped flying a month ago and are now clinging to leaves on the forest floor, where life remains on hold. Yellowjackets and wood frogs are employing the same strategy; their wait-it-out world near the ground surface will become a much more survivable place with the addition of snow, which captures the heat of the ground ‹ the rich deposit of the sun’s summer energy that cool air is now withdrawing. That faint, ever-escaping warmth will enable the tiny creatures to avoid the killing air that is just ahead. They have evolved to survive cold, but not 40 degrees below zero.

When snow arrives, it changes everything. Not only does its physical presence make a fox’s task of moving and eating more difficult, but also on a grand scale it transforms the ground from absorber of warmth to a giant mirror. Daytime high temperatures warmer than the freezing point are common before snowfall, rare afterward. When snow comes, the deep freeze really takes over.

Colder days harden the ice to a thickness that supports a caribou, then an entire herd. Creeks solidify and stop feeding rivers, which steam with resistive movement until even they surrender. In the far north, since mid-September the air has been cold enough to form rafts and shields on top of seawater, as sea ice begins another long season of growth.

Even with the airy insulation of snow, the ground surface here in mid-Alaska freezes deeper each day. Some water-saturated soil expands, increasing with irresistible force the elevation of some areas. The freezing front penetrates deeper, sometimes joining crystal fingers with ground that never thawed during the summer. Permafrost, which by definition has endured in a rock-hard state through at least two summers, formed during a colder period of Earth’s existence. It endures today because, despite the illusion of Alaska’s summers, cold is king here.

Our extreme, predictable cold has resulted in some evolutionary marvels. The far north features, for example, a super breed of black-capped chickadee, smarter and larger than its cousins down south. Our climate is also the driver for the development of microbes within a moose’s gut that somehow transform frozen twigs into enough energy to sustain a 600-pound creature every day. For seven months.

The Big Freeze has also inspired another life strategy that seems to be working well. Bears are now avoiding winter in cozy earthen bunkers on hillsides and hollows all over the Alaska map. They will remain warm and curled, while the soil around them freezes, snow hisses to the ground above, and the world, day by day, grows darker, until it seems the light will never return.

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
9/21/2011

DENALI NATIONAL PARK AND PRESERVE–On a late autumn day, as naked stems of dwarf birch nod away from a warm breeze, a distant flash of antler reveals the object of our search.

“The hunters would love to see him,” Vic Van Ballenberghe says as he pulls his pickup to the side of the park road and grabs his binoculars. “He’s a trophy bull.”

The giant moose strolls over a brownish slope that waits for snow. The creature pauses at times, steering with massive antlers one of the cows that orbit him.

“He’s got seven with him,” Van Ballenberghe says of a group of blondish female moose.

The sight of eight moose is a treat for me, Van Ballenberghe’s guest for the day, but the 67-year old biologist has stood close enough to smell the musk of these moose every spring and fall since 1980. That’s the year he first visited the park and knew he had found the perfect place to study the behavior of this iconic large mammal.

He noted how the Denali Park road cuts right through great moose habitat, enabling him to drive within hiking distance to observe them. He saw plenty of moose along the road in 1980, animals that weren’t spooked by people. The bulls were large there, too, in part because the park’s ban on hunting.

In 1980, Van Ballenberghe was a biologist with the U.S. Forest Service in Fairbanks. After visiting Denali National Park and Preserve, he wrote a proposal to see if he could make his dream study happen. The staff at Denali Park thought it was a great idea, and the U.S. Forest Service funded the study. Since 1980, Van Ballenberghe has spent more moments in the close proximity of moose than anyone alive.

“It’s totaled up to thousands and thousands of hours,” Van Ballenberghe says.

Like one of the sandhill cranes croaking overhead on this fall day, Van Ballenberghe has migrated from his home in Anchorage to Denali Park both in spring, when cow moose give birth, and during fall mating season, when dominant bulls gather harems of cows and defend them from other bulls. He retired in 2000, but has continued his study with support from the National Park Service, which provides him an apartment near its headquarters and gives him access to the moose in areas others are not allowed.

During the last three decades, Van Ballenberghe and those who have worked with him have cranked out a library of published information about the Denali Park moose, including a nonfiction book, “In the Company of Moose.” Van Ballenberghe and others found that, in some years, eight out of 10 moose calves don’t make it to adulthood, with grizzlies eating half of them and wolves accounting for just 6 percent of calf loss.

Van Ballenberghe knows that Denali Park cow moose can live to be 20 (“it’s like a 100-year-old person”) and most of its bulls are gone by the age of 13. He observed a cow that gave birth in almost the exact same spot for 12 consecutive years.

He knows moose prefer diamondleaf willow in summer and the frozen buds of felt leaf willow in winter, and they will gorge on mushrooms when they are available. He’s noticed that moose almost never sleep for more than five minutes at a time. He has seen a fall gathering of 22 cows and 12 bulls, and he knows that those bulls did not eat for more than two weeks until the rut ended in early October.

Van Ballenberghe has seen a three-foot September snowfall in 1992 that jumpstarted a winter in which one-third of his collared moose died from starvation. He also remembers 1981, when so little snow fell that he could have driven to Wonder Lake though no one was plowing the road. He has, during three decades, watched spruce trees invade a section of open tundra, and noted the crashes and booms of snowshoe hare and lynx (the latter of which now are more numerous than at any time he can remember).

Mostly, he sees and studies moose; sometimes approaching them so close he can hear them breathe. In this era of satellite tracking and circling animals with Super Cubs, he has kept alive what he described in his book as an “old-fashioned, naturalistic approach of directly observing wild animals at close range.”

He is critical of Alaska’s predator-control program, claiming that too much emphasis is put on killing wolves and that decision-makers don’t listen enough to scientists. “It took decades to establish science-based wildlife management in Alaska,” he says. “Now all that effort has been lost as politics primarily drives predator control.”

While most studies are considered long-term if a scientist keeps at it for four years, Van Ballenberghe’s work, at 32 years and counting, is a true outlier. This year, he will keep walking off the park road to observe his radio-collared moose up close until the beginning of October. One of the moose mysteries he still hopes to solve is whether a cow moose has an active choice in which bull fathers her calves. (Cows emit a “protest groan” that might be their way of rejecting a suitor by calling in a larger bull.)

On the Denali Park road, after a morning and early afternoon of driving in search of moose, Van Ballenberghe watches the big bull through trusted binoculars that have focused on more moose than probably any other pair in existence.

“He’s at least 8 (-years-old), maybe 11 or 12,” he says. “They don’t get that big until fully mature.”

Making a mental note of the bull’s location and the number of cows in its harem, Van Ballenberghe set down his binoculars. The dominant bull, whose genes will live on long after Van Ballenberghe’s time here is done, melts into the brush. One by one, its cows follow, until it seems there are no more moose in the world.

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.

Amy Hartley
907-474-5823
9/26/11

Located at the top of the globe, beneath the Arctic Ocean, the Amerasia Basin is poorly understood. This large depression in the ocean floor was created during the Mesozoic Era, the age of the dinosaurs, but how the tectonic plates shifted to open up and create the basin remains a puzzle. Professor Bernard Coakley and a 12-person crew currently aboard the research vessel Marcus G. Langseth hope to find the fossil plate boundaries associated with the basin and recreate the birth of this mysterious feature.

Coakley, a marine geologist with the University of Alaska Fairbanks Geophysical Institute and the College of Natural Science and Mathematics, is the chief scientist on the cruise. By email from the ship, Coakley explained how the crew is collecting seismic reflection data on the sedimentary make-up of the seafloor in a specific transect of the ocean. “We already have good information. If things continue as they have so far, we will be able to collect the complete grid I’ve laid out and probably have some time left for additional work.”

UAF undergraduates Emily Decker and Grant Cain and two UAF doctoral candidates, Ibrahim Ilhan and Melissa Johnson, are assisting Coakley on this project. UAF alumnus Dayton Dove is serving as the co-chief scientist on the cruise. The crew work 12-hour shifts and data collection is going well. Coakley said the crew is getting along marvelously, despite the close quarters and the repetitive nature of the work.

“‘Groundhog Day’ is a movie people cite for life onboard,” Coakley wrote. “The routine is the same every day. The things you do and when you do them don’t move around very much. Only the data change.”

The research cruise began when the ship, the Marcus G. Langseth, left Dutch Harbor, Alaska Sept. 6. It will run until Oct. 10. During the cruise, Coakley is posting frequent updates from the ship on The New York Times’ blog Scientist at Work. You can read Coakley’s posts at http://scientistatwork.blogs.nytimes.com/author/bernard-coakley/.

ADDITIONAL CONTACTS: Bernard Coakley, professor of marine geophysics, at 907-474-5385 or via email at bernar[email protected].

AH/9-26-11/076-12

Ned Rozell
907-474-7468
9/21/2011

Alaskans love fungi. This was evident on a recent Saturday when author and mycologist Lawrence Millman offered a mushroom walk at Creamer’s Field on one of the wettest days of the yellow-leaf season.

“Eighty people showed up in the rain, all eager to learn about fungi,” Millman said by email after returning to his home in Massachusetts. “I dare say the hunter-gatherer instinct is alive and well in Fairbanks.”

And why shouldn’t it be, since Fungus Man made life possible? During a lecture at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, Millman introduced the crowd to Fungus Man, a character in a Haida myth. Millman showed a drawing depicting a wide-eyed Fungus Man paddling a canoe. Fungus Man guides Raven, who sits in the front of the canoe holding a spear.

As the legend goes, Fungus Man paddled Raven the Creator to the land of female genitalia, “thus making it possible for homosapiens to appear on our beleaguered planet,” Millman said.

Robert Blanchette of the University of Minnesota once fleshed out Fungus Man in the journal Mycologia: “Fungus Man originated from a bracket fungus with a white undersurface upon which Raven drew a face . . . Of all the creatures that Raven placed in the stern of the canoe only Fungus Man had the supernatural powers to breach the spiritual barriers that protected the area where women’s genital parts were located.”

So, we owe a lot to fungi, one of five kingdoms of living things, chock full of puffballs, mushrooms, and other examples of what Millman calls “incredible and essential biomass.”

The kingdom of fungi includes mushrooms, which are the fruiting bodies of a more complex organism hidden underground. Without fungi, the boreal forest would neither grow nor decay.

Fungi were important enough to Southeast Alaska and other Pacific Northwest Natives that figurines carved from “conks” (shelf fungus that grow from birch and other trees) were placed upon the graves of shaman, to protect them during their “long death sleep.” Blanchette wrote this in an article about bear, eagle and human figurines, swiped from the shaman graves in Southeast Alaska by collector George Emmons from 1880 to 1900. Emmons shipped them away to a museum in Chicago, where people mistook them for wood until recently.

But Millman, a frequent visitor to the far north, noted in his lecture that Interior and coastal Alaskans didn’t seem to have the same reverence for fungi as the Southeasterners. Though he notes the use of puffballs to stop bleeding (the spores are about the same size as blood cells), he has found little evidence of ancient northern Alaskans eating mushrooms, the fruiting body of a fungus.

Perhaps, he said, it was because a Yupik translation of mushroom means “that which makes your hands fall off.” Or because some Natives of the far north explained mushrooms as “the (excrement) of shooting stars.”

“You don’t invite people to dinner to eat (excrement),” he said.

Another possible theory for the absence of mushroom-consumption among far-northern people is because fungi are poor in calories. Millman mentioned the term “rabbit starvation,” a phrase used to describe how someone could perish on a lean diet of only snowshoe hare meat. Mushrooms offer even less of what it takes to propel a body.

“If you’re on the move, you need calories,” he said.

Millman is a champion of fungi, essential to life but forgotten for most of the year until mushrooms pop up in August. He is also a great fan of its mythical embodiment that paddles the canoe of creation.

“You can quote me as saying that Fungus Man is a far more benevolent deity than the Christian God,” Millman said. “(It’s) a pity no one believes in Him anymore.”

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.

Ned Rozell
907-474-7468
9/16/2011

A few years ago, Ronald Daanen was driving north of Coldfoot on the Dalton Highway, looking for drunken trees. He pulled over when he saw some tipsy spruce on a hillside.

The University of Alaska Fairbanks scientist thought the tilted trees would be a classic sign of thawing permafrost, ground that has remained frozen through the heat of at least two summers.

But these trees were part of something larger—a giant tongue of moving hillside that was oozing toward the Dalton Highway.

When covered in snow, the mass looks like a glacier covered with trees, but it’s not a glacier. Nor is it a rock glacier, a mass of rock and ice that slowly slips down mountains (there are several in the Alaska Range and the Wrangells).

Permafrost scientists have found three of them close to the road near Coldfoot and have seen several more along the highway south of Atigun Pass. Using Google imagery, they have found many more in the same area. Retired USGS geologist Tom Hamilton saw the same features as he mapped the geology of the area in the 1970s. Hamilton called them “flow slides.” Daanen and Guido Grosse of the University of Alaska Fairbanks’ Geophysical Institute are calling the features “debris flows.” In a paper they recently co-wrote, the scientists describe the phenomena as “an unusual form of mass movement.”

On a trip north a few springs ago, Daanen, Grosse and others punched through wet snowpack and climbed up on the lobes. They found huge cracks in the ground. Some of the trees were split at the base. The clues told them that the hill upon which they stood was moving, probably after a long period during which it didn’t budge (which allowed the spruce to grow tall there, at the northern edge of where spruce exist in Alaska).

“We were totally surprised,” Grosse said. “The flow is pushing over trees in front of the lobe and burying vegetation like a bulldozer.”

Using images from aerial photography and satellites, the researchers mapped three moving masses near Coldfoot that are creeping toward the Dalton Highway. Comparing snapshots from different years, they found that the lobes are now moving downhill about 3 meters (about 10 feet) per year.

Last spring, Daanen returned from a Dalton Highway road trip with GPS data that was a bit more dramatic.

“There’s one just south of the three we surveyed earlier that moved 10 meters (about 30 feet) during the last year alone,” Grosse said.

One of the clumps of drunken trees and moving soil is now within 75 meters (about 225 feet) of the Dalton Highway. It’s moving slower than the fastest flow, but might speed up.

“If it accelerates to 10 meters per year, like the other one did, it will hit the road within eight years,” Grosse said. “If the rate stays like it is, it will hit the road in 25 years, which is still pretty fast in geological terms.”

The flow hasn’t yet plowed into the Dalton Highway’s right-of-way, but its fine silt washing downstream is filling culverts and hinting of high maintenance costs to come. Though on a much smaller (and slower) scale, the northern debris flows are like the advance of Black Rapids Glacier toward the Richardson Highway in the 1930s. Black Rapids shrunk backward before it crossed the highway, but there’s no sign that the bulldozed mounds descending upon the Dalton will do the same.

“I’m not aware of any glacier so close to infrastructure,” Grosse said.

The researchers are seeking funding to find out more about the northern tongues of rock, ice, and silt, which have so far defied traditional scientific explanation.

“I still believe these features are different, although I have a hard time convincing the established researchers in the field,” Daanen 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. Ned Rozell is a science writer at the institute.

Ned Rozell
907-474-7468
9/7/2011

 

Four summers ago, Syndonia Bret-Harte stood outside at Toolik Lake, watching a wall of smoke creep toward the research station on Alaska’s North Slope. Soon after, smoke oozed over the cluster of buildings.

“It was a dense, choking fog,” Bret-Harte said.

The smoke looked, smelled and tasted like what Bret-Harte has experienced at her home in Fairbanks, but the far-north version was composed of vaporized tundra plants instead of black spruce and birch. The 2007 Anaktuvuk River fire, which burned an area the size of Cape Cod, is the largest fire ever recorded in tundra. It was the first wildfire in the area since slaves were shoving blocks in place to create the pyramids in Egypt (about 5,000 years ago).

Bret-Harte and others working at the research station knew they were witnessing something unusual — or maybe seeing the future. They found funding to study the burn, and time in their schedules to get their feet on the black ground. The group of scientists, led by Michelle Mack of the University of Florida, collaborated on a study published recently in the journal Nature.

Bret-Harte, a plant specialist, recently returned from a helicopter trip to the site of the big fire. Her close-up images show a green, lush landscape as the tundra recovers nicely after four summers.

“It’s not back to what it was before — the shrubs are small,” Bret-Harte said. “But in 10 years it will look pretty similar over much of the area.”

The new vegetation is photosynthesizing with such vigor that it is taking up as much carbon dioxide from the air as nearby tundra that did not burn in 2007, Bret-Harte said. This is quite a change compared to the staggering amount of carbon the fire added to the atmosphere four summers ago. The researchers calculated that the smoke from the 2007 fire spewed about half as much carbon dioxide as all arctic vegetation in the world sucked in during an average year.

If the tundra burned like that every year, in a flash the Arctic could turn from a place where carbon dioxide is pulled from the atmosphere and locked away, to a carbon dioxide generator that would further warm the world.

“The carbon that was lost in this fire represented about 30 to 50 years of accumulation in the soil,” Bret-Harte said. “But if you burned it again now, you’re getting into the deeper, older carbon. You’d be burning away this bank of carbon stored in the soil over thousands of years. That would be huge.”

Was the 2007 Anaktuvuk River fire a freakish, one-time event, or a sign of things to come? Bret-Harte said she doesn’t know, but she does know the conditions that led to the 2007 event. A lightning strike ignited the tundra in mid-July. Wet soils and vegetation snuff most tundra fires, but this one endured because of an exceptionally dry summer. The fire smoldered for a few months until dry Chinook winds curled over the Brooks Range in September, fanning the fire to life.

“It burned most of the area in five or six days,” Bret-Harte said.

Though the giant tundra fire of 2007 happened due to a combination of rare conditions, at least one of those factors is becoming more common. According to sensors maintained by workers for the Bureau of Land Management, lightning has struck Alaska’s North Slope much more frequently lately. From a steady hit rate of a few thousand lightning strikes from the mid-1980s until the late 1990s, lightning strikes have jumped to about 20,000 each year in the last decade. More lightning strikes and warmer summers might change what people know as a smoke-free northern Alaska.

Bret-Harte wonders, “Is this like a tipping point, moving us to a new regime on the North Slope?”

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.

Ned Rozell
907-474-7468
9/1/2011

Somewhere in the rolling tundra east of Deadhorse, a lone wolf hunts. The 100-pound male will take anything it can catch, or find a ptarmigan, a darting tundra rodent, a fish, the scraps of a carcass, or, if lucky, a moose calf or caribou. Hunger is a common companion, but the wolf somehow survived when his mate probably died of it last winter.

That event may have triggered the lone wolf’s incredible summer journey from south of the Yukon River to the crumbling shores of the Beaufort Sea. The wolf has traveled about 1,500 miles in four months, according to biologist John Burch, who works for the National Park Service.

Burch has studied wolves and the things wolves eat since the mid-1990s at Yukon-Charley Rivers National Preserve and Gates of the Arctic National Park and Preserve. Last November, he was part of a team that helicoptered to Copper Creek, a remote tributary of the clear-running Charley River. There, he tranquilized a healthy male wolf and fitted it with a satellite radio collar. The collar transmits GPS coordinates from the wolf every few days, which has allowed Burch to follow the wolf’s trans-Alaska trek this summer.

Burch would have preferred that the wolf remain near Yukon-Charley, 2.5 million acres where the Yukon flows into Alaska. The wolf’s collar is expensive and would give useful information about one of a dozen wolf packs that use the preserve as part of their home range. But the lone male is telling the biologists a different story about wolf behavior and what happens when a pack breaks up.

The solo male’s pack was a small one. In 2006, the biologists had collared a dominant breeding female in what scientists called the Edwards Creek pack, which due to the rigors of living in hungry country shrunk to its smallest possible size.

“She ended up being the only member of that pack,” Burch said. “She didn’t pair up for a while, which was unusual. We joked that she must have been kind of ugly.”

But then, last August, there he was. A large male bonded with the Edwards Creek female. In November, they caught him and installed his collar.

The wolves’ short time together ended in February 2011, when the female died, possibly of starvation. A wolverine had eaten her carcass when Burch and others investigated. They didn’t see the male around; he traveled around the preserve for a while but didn’t catch Burch’s attention until later in the spring. That’s when, for some reason, he took off.

From May until now, the wolf has been on the move. The animal dodged ice chunks as it swam the Yukon. Then it shook itself off and headed for the upper Kandik River. From there, it drifted into Canada for a few days, juked back into Alaska and plunged into the Porcupine River. Another water obstacle forded, it headed north into quiet country. It crossed back into Canada and crested the Brooks Range near the upper Firth River, trotted eastward towards the Mackenzie River and then veered for the northern coast, close enough to smell the ocean.

From there, the wolf made a straight line back into Alaska, where it got close enough to see the Dalton Highway, a boundary it hasn’t yet crossed. The wolf is still up there, about 20 miles east of Deadhorse. It lingers at its peril if another wolf pack patrols that area, Burch said.

Because other wolves are territorial, the lone male has all summer snuck “through the gauntlet of these resident wolves,” Burch said. “It’s a dangerous game. If they find a strange wolf going through their range, they’ll kill it.”

Burch has also studied wolves at Denali National Park, finding them most at risk from their own species.

“The primary cause of death in Denali was being killed by your neighbor,” he said.

Why would the male in the prime of his life take such a risk? Burch said because usually only the dominant pair of a wolf pack breed, others might wander to find their own opportunities. And because it’s such a tough life out there (a wolf that lives to 10 is doing well), the chance to join a new pack often exists.

“If one of the dominant pair dies, the other might accept a dispersing wolf as its new mate, or he might find a dispersing female,” Burch said.

The lone wolf now roaming the tundra east of Deadhorse is now probably sniffing at scent posts and spots where other wolves have urinated, and using its other senses to weigh its chances.

“He could possibly determine that there’s no breeding males (in the territory),” Burch said.

Wolves on the move have another species to avoid, Burch said.

“When a wolf encounters humans, it’s usually not good for the wolf,” Burch said. “He’s a fairly young wolf and he might not be too savvy around a fish camp or a dog yard.”

The wolf’s long-distance journey, a drama being played out all over Alaska all year long, may end with it becoming the dominant male of a pack roaming treeless country up north. Or it may conclude in a few months, with Burch recovering the collar on a pile of hair, or a hunter or trapper turning in a collar to an Alaska Department of Fish and Game office.

“The other possibility is he could come back (to the eastern Yukon River),” Burch said. “He could realize where he came from wasn’t that bad.”

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.

Amy Hartley
907-474-5823
8/31/11

The University of Alaska Fairbanks has selected Robert “Bob” McCoy as the Geophysical Institute’s new director. McCoy will be the fifth scientist to the hold the post since the institute was established in Fairbanks in 1946.

McCoy has more than 15 years of research experience as a space scientist at the Naval Research Laboratory and 15 years of administrative experience at the Office of Naval Research in Arlington, Va., where he is the team leader for space science and technology. Currently, he also serves as the technical director for the Operationally Responsive Space Office in Albuquerque, N.M.

“McCoy’s broad scientific background, combined with his extensive program management experience, makes him the ideal choice to lead the strategic growth of the Geophysical Institute,” said Mark Myers, UAF vice chancellor for research.

Throughout his career, McCoy has overseen multimillion-dollar operating budgets and managed interdisciplinary teams of scientists, engineers, contractors and students. McCoy is a strong advocate for education and K-12 outreach. He has received a variety of awards, including NRL 75th Anniversary Innovator Award in 1998, the Alan Berman Publication Award in 1994 and 2001, the NRL Group Achievement Award in 1983, the NASA Group Achievement Award in 2004 and the Rotary International Stellar Award in 2010.

McCoy earned his bachelor’s degree in physics from Cornell University, a master’s degree in physics from Texas A&M University and a doctorate in astrogeophysics at the University of Colorado in 1981. McCoy will begin his new $160,000-a-year position in October.

“I’ve always admired the Geophysical Institute and it seems to be in the right place at the right time. It’s very exciting to see all of the research areas becoming hot topics right now,” McCoy said from New Mexico. “I see a lot of opportunities for the GI to excel even more.”

ADDITIONAL CONTACTS: Marmian Grimes, UAF public information officer, at 907-474-7902 or [email protected].

AH/8-31-11/049-12

Ned Rozell
907-474-7468
8/25/2011

Some experiments never end, especially ones involving plastic objects released in the far north.

In late July 2011, Paul Boots, a supervisor at an oilfield on Alaska’s North Slope, found a small, yellow plastic disc on a creekbed. Scientists 30 years ago tossed the disc into the sea as part of a study on arctic oil spills.

Boots, who works at the large gravel pad that hosts the Badami oil field, was with his coworkers on an annual cleanup day along a nameless creek just west of the gravel pad.

“I was enjoying a beautiful day and strayed a bit farther than most in my search for Œfugitive emissions’ (everything we pick up has been blown off of our pad),” he wrote in an email. “I found the disc about 50 yards from the saltwater.”

Boots at first thought the saucer was part of a weather balloon. Then he saw a typewritten message: “One Dollar Reward on Return of Serial Number With Date Found, Location, Your Name and Address to Geophysics Institute, University of Alaska, Fairbanks.”

More interested in finding the history of the disc than making a buck, Boots sent a to-whom-it-may-concern message to Blake Moore at the Alaska Climate Research Center at the Geophysical Institute. Knowing I’ve been around here for many moons, Blake forwarded the message to me.

The discs have been subjects of these weekly columns a few times, the first by Larry Gedney in 1982. Gedney wrote of how researcher Brian Matthews and his coworkers released 6,800 of the yellow discs, called drifters, into lagoons and the open sea along the coastline near Prudhoe Bay from 1977 until 1981.

Gedney, one of my favorite writers of this column (which has existed since 1976), described the disc as resembling “a yellow freshman beanie with a two-foot-long flexible stem extending downward from its center.” There were two types of drifter ‹ one that floated on the surface and one with a small brass weight attached to the stem that made it float just below the water’s surface. The stems seem to be the only part of the disc that has disappeared.

People living and working on the North Slope recovered and sent in about 900 of the discs by the time of Gedney’s story, but most of the originals endure somewhere out there. Official monitoring of the experiment ended when Matthews departed from Alaska in the early 1980s, but thanks to the infinite endurance of

plastic and the ink message somehow still emblazed on the discs, a few have found their way back to the Geophysical Institute.

In 1998, two brothers beachcombing in northern Scotland found one of the discs and returned it. The disc made it to Scotland after spinning in an ocean current by the North Pole for about a decade before it was spit through Fram Strait, UAF oceanographer Tom Weingartner said at the time. In 2007, a UAF graduate student studying birds on the tundra near Barrow found another one about 60 feet from a lagoon.

At a time when environmental groups are challenging oil companies to prove they can clean up oil spills in the Arctic, a task that is difficult even in settings where oil booms and skimmer boats are on-site, the drifter experiment also points out the remarkable resilience of plastic, a substance that even in its flimsiest form will outlive us all.

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.