Monthly Archives: May 2012

 

Wind-aided birds on their way north

Posted 29 May 2012 by Liz O'Connell

by Ned Rozell A flock of bar tailed godwits departs Alaska in September from Nelson Lagoon on the Alaska Peninsula. Photo by Bob Gill After flying northward from Chile, a whimbrel landed in late March in an alfalfa field near Mexicali, Mexico. The handsome shorebird with a long curved beak left its wintering ground in South America one week earlier and flew more than 5,000 miles. Nonstop. In one of the great migrations happening all over the world right now,... Read more

Author Posted in Arctic's Amazing Birds | Kommentare 0 Comments | Permalink

Sunken Treasure under Lake El’gygytgyn

Posted 23 May 2012 by Liz O'Connell

Laura Nielsen for Frontier Scientists Deep under a frozen lake in Siberia, Russia, lies a researcher’s gold: an astounding record of past climates preserved in untouched layers of lake bed sediment. In 2009 an international team of scientists headed to Lake El’gygytgyn (pronounced El’geegitgin). They perched specialized drilling equipment atop the icy lake surface and drilled down. At the bottom of the lake as much as a quarter mile (1,312 feet) of sediment awaited them atop the site of a... Read more

Author Posted in Climate Change Watch, Permafrost, Where is Lake E'gygytgyn? | Kommentare 1 Comments | Permalink

Recovery after world’s largest tundra fire raises questions

Posted 15 May 2012 by Liz O'Connell

by Ned Rozell The scar from the Anaktuvuk River fire of 2007, which scorched an area as large as Cape Cod. NASA MODIS image. 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... Read more

Author Posted in Climate Change Watch | Kommentare 0 Comments | Permalink

Tools of ancient Alaskans emerge from ice

Posted 1 May 2012 by Liz O'Connell

by Ned Rozell On a late summer evening a few years ago, a scrap of birch bark caught William Manley’s eye as he walked along the edge of an ice field in the Wrangell-St. Elias Mountains. The geologist yelled to nearby archaeologist Jim Dixon and Ruth Ann Warden of the Ahtna Heritage Foundation. The remains of a 650-year old birch bark basket complete with stitching holes, found at the base of an ice patch in the Wrangell-St. Elias Mountains. Photo... Read more

Author Posted in Arctic Archaeology | Kommentare 0 Comments | Permalink