Yukimarimo. Photo: Shannon Coykendall

A late December bedecking of Yukimarimo around Summit Station seemed like “a present befitting the season,” wrote Ben Toth, whose team is keeping the NSF-funded research station and its ongoing experiments running through mid-winter.

“These little snowballs occur when fine frost layers form on the snow surface at cold air temperatures,” Ben explained. “These balls form due to weak wind conditions and become mobile, like little tumbleweeds across the surface, collecting in pockets sculpted by drift or in footprints.”

Ben says the team of five “finished off the year with a productive week sandwiched between the two holidays. Christmas Sunday was celebrated with the requisite Christmas tunes, a lit tree, decorations, and a Kiwi-style meal of “good tucker.” Rack of lamb and pavlova was on the menu as was roasted squash (the very last) and amazing maple syrup pies.

“New Year’s Eve was celebrated [with] a plethora of appetizers. . . . The tapas-themed meal segued into a comfortable evening counting down to 2012. All hands made it to midnight but retired shortly thereafter, rising somewhat later than usual on New Year’s Day to spectacular light and clear weather bringing in the new year.”

For more on Yukimarimo, visit http://homepage3.nifty.com/takaokameda/index.html)

Tumbled snow or Yukimarimo at Summit Station, Greenland. Photo: Shannon Coykendall

Comments (1) Jan 02 2012

Comments (0) Dec 27 2011

 Frosty Freeze

The walk back from the atmospheric watch building seems a bit longer on cold winter days. From this point of view, Summit Station's science and operations building nudges the iconic Big House, with its roof-perched radome and welcoming porch light. Photo: Shannon Coykendall

We were glad to read that cold north winds, which for several weeks had been dominating the weather reports from Summit Station, subsided last week. A welcome relief to deep freeze conditions reported earlier. “We hit a wind chill of -107F earlier today and the ambient temperature is around -67F…it doesn’t take much wind to make it bite!”, wrote Shannon Coykendall on 30 November.

The moon rises over a winter storage berm at Summit Station. Photo: Shannon Coykendall

In addition to bringing the cold, north winds can blow exhaust from station generators into the pristine sampling zone. Ongoing atmospheric and snow chemistry measurements are impacted when the station’s emissions mix into the signal. So, during periods when the winds blow from the north, station personnel avoid activities that create exhaust.

Twice during late November and early December, the staff had to fire heavy equipment to collect snow to resupply the station’s water supply during north wind conditions. Each time, the science technicians followed protocol and notified the research community.

Heavy equipment stored outside at Summit Station in Greenland gets a nice layer of frost. Photo: Shannon Coykendall

Finally, last week, “Summit crawled out from underneath the north winds that have dominated the past few weeks. Bringing clouds and warmer weather, the southerlies created an opportune chance to catch up on making water and for the science techs to perform their non-north wind tasking,” wrote station manager Ben Toth. “The winds also gained strength this week, reaching sustained speeds of 15.5 knots. Temperatures this week ranged from a low of -60 C on Tuesday to a high of a balmy -34 C on Saturday.”–Kip Rithner

Comments (2) Dec 15 2011

Dangerous ice conditions in Davis Slough off the Tanana River in early December. Ice conditions like this make traveling along rural Alaska’s icy lakes and rivers hazardous. Photos courtesy Knut Kielland

Each winter as the temperatures in Alaska dip well below zero, the frozen rivers and lakes become highways and byways for many rural Alaskans. Just a short distance outside Fairbanks, one of Alaska’s largest cities, the lack of traditional roads and bridges reminds one just how rural and rugged a large part of Alaska is. With few traditional roads, many rural Alaskans navigate the seemingly frozen bodies of water on snowmobiles and dog sleds.  And all too often they come in contact with dangerous ice.

This is something ecologists Knut Kielland and his colleague Bill Schneider, an oral historian, know all too well. Kielland and Schneider, both avid dog mushers and researchers at University of Alaska, Fairbanks (UAF), have been criss-crossing the Alaska countryside along the Tanana River outside of Fairbanks for nearly 25 years. During that time the two have certainly run into their fair share of dangerous ice, but there were several unusual phenomena associated with dangerous ice that piqued their interest.

Knut Kielland came up with the idea to study the phenomena behind dangerous ice while dog mushing. Here he is guiding his team through overflow on the Anaktuvuk River on Alaska’s North Slope.

Degrading Ice

At 584-miles long, the Tanana River is a natural force that cuts through the landscape of central Alaska. During the winter the Tanana River exhibits a wide variety of dangerous ice conditions, ranging from overflow (water on top of the ice surface covered by dry snow) to shell ice (ice with air pockets underneath). “The most insidious ice condition is degrading ice,” Kielland said. “This condition refers to ice that forms normally during freeze-up and represents a safe travel surface in early winter. However, as the name implies, degrading ice exhibits dangerous thinning during mid-winter even at very cold (-30°C) air temperatures. The physical mechanisms behind this phenomenon and the distribution of such ice conditions are a major focus of our project.”

With support from the National Science Foundation, Kielland, Schneider and a multidisciplinary team of researchers set out to study and map the physical conditions behind winter dangerous ice conditions, as well as document local knowledge and observations across a 200-mile study area near the Tanana River. The data from the project will help scientists understand the forces behind dangerous ice, and give rural Alaskans tools that may improve public safety.

A Complex Issue Needs a Complex Approach

Kielland wanted to study dangerous ice from multiple angles, including human interactions with this natural force. To do that, Kielland paired teams of natural scientists with oral historians and ethnographers to take a holistic approach.

“In terms of the multidisciplinary approach, we’re talking about climatology, hydrology and the physics of snow and ice—that’s the natural science part. In terms of the social science, it’s both the science of going about how to collect oral histories and learning about how residents view and experience their environment, and more directly in terms of how they experience the changing winter conditions, particularly in regard to snow and ice conditions,” Kielland explained.

Sam Demientieff of Fairbanks inspects ice degradation in Moe Slough, February, 2010.

Community Involvement

Involving local communities in the study area has been a key part of the dangerous ice project.  Many of the villagers and townspeople have traveled the frozen rivers and lakes for decades and have valuable knowledge and insight that machines and computers simply can’t duplicate.

To gather data on how locals call upon years of experience and training to frame their descriptions and evaluate ice conditions, Kielland looked to his longtime friend and oral historian Bill Schneider to record interviews with locals. Having lived and worked in Alaska for decades, it was relatively easy to tap the wealth of knowledge about rural Alaska’s frozen highways.

Residents of Manley Hot Springs meet to discuss the ice conditions along the river trail between Manley and the village of Tanana. LPictured from left oto right: are, John Dart, Espen Jervsjö, and Frank Gurtler (Manley), and Charlie Wright (Tanana).

“Because we’ve lived here for a while, we have friends and acquaintances—and acquaintances of acquaintances—in a variety of communities. We were very fortunate that we could pretty much come into a community and establish a rapport with them,” Kielland said.

Ice Interviews

The team worked with communities in Fairbanks, Manley and the village of Tanana to gather their observations on the distribution and abundance of dangerous ice phenomena and how they impact  subsistence activities and travel throughout the winter. With help from Karen Brewster, a research associate for the Oral History Program at UAF, the team has hosted several workshops and interviews in the field with river travelers, the results of which are now being posted online.

Research associate Karen Brewster films interviews with Sam Demientieff (left) and Wally Carlo (right) on the Tanana River, March 2011.

“We  do semi-direct interview [s], take a lot of photographs and videotap[e]ing of areas and interviews,” Kielland said.  Interviews and photos from the dangerous ice project are made publicly available through the University of Alaska Fairbanks’ Project Jukebox.

The combination of physical data and recorded oral histories has started to crack some of the mysteries of dangerous ice, shedding new light on the phenomena and how rural Alaskans deal with it.

Cracking the Ice

Some of the initial findings are a bit of a surprise to Kielland and his colleagues. Initially, he hypothesized that dangerous ice occurrences were tied to shallower (< 1 m) portions of the river more susceptible to melting from below due to ground water upwelling. However, that’s not always the case. The team has observed cases of dangerous ice in deeper waters (> 3 m).

Kielland has also documented very localized instances of dangerous ice where, “it’s almost like somebody sat down at the bottom [of the river or lake] with a laser and shot a hole in the ice. Hydrologists on the project are still working to understand the physics behind such localized events.

“We’re learning about the phenomena, about how wide- spread it is, and we’re learning about how people deal with it—though mostly they just want to stay far away from it,” Kielland said. “We don’t know much about how it has changed through time yet, but we hope our conversations with local residents can shed further light on that.”

Although winters in Alaska are getting warmer on the whole, dangerous ice phenomena aren’t necessarily a direct consequence of climate change.

“Winters in Alaska are getting warmer and climate predictions call for more snow. Both of those factors will probably exacerbate the situation, if anything, but we don’t consider this a direct consequence of warming. As I mentioned, we see the phenomenon even when it’s very cold out,” he said.

Lessons Learned

With the second year of the dangerous ice project now coming to a close, Kielland and Schneider hope to extend it for one more year to continue unraveling the mysteries behind dangerous ice.

The lessons learned from this project will not only tell us where dangerous ice is located and it’s potential causes, they will also help rural Alaskans avoid a wintertime problem that claims lives every year.

“We hope that at the end of the day, there will be an improved understanding from both our and their [rural Alaskans’] point of view about the nature of the phenomenon and how it’s distributed along the length of the Tanana that many of them travel,” Kielland said. For more information about the Dangerous Ice project (still under construction), visit: http://jukebox.uaf.edu/dangerice/start.htm. –Alicia Clarke

Comments (1) Dec 05 2011

A Polaris Ranger outfitted with tracks helps stretch fiber optics cable across the tundra near Toolik Station. All photos: Rorik Peterson

Many rural Alaskan towns remain without reliable communications infrastructure, particularly when it comes to the Internet. Rorik Peterson, a mechanical  engineer  from the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, hopes to change that by stringing fiber optics cable across the Alaskan tundra.

Peterson, whose research includes modeling the seasonal freezing and thawing of soils, began a NSF-funded study during the 2011 spring that focuses on the durability of fiber optics cable in the harsh arctic climate. In April he and colleagues traveled to Toolik Station to set up their two-year experiment.

Routing cable from Toolik.

“It was a bit of a headache setting up our study at Toolik because of the many science groups that use the facility and study the ecosystems around the facility. But we worked together to find a time when we would not impact other science projects.  Seven station staff and I spent an entire day spooling out cable across several environments to see how the cable will fare over a couple of years. Not only is weather a consideration, animals are as well,” explains Peterson.

Fiber optics cables are currently operational between Anchorage and Fairbanks and along the Dalton Highway (the “Haul Road”) between Fairbanks and Prudhoe Bay, but burying cables is impractical given the remote setting of many Alaskan villages.

“We set our cable on top of the snow and tundra using a Polaris Ranger retrofitted with tracks. We had a 5km spool of cable trailered on the station pad that unspooled as we drove. We wanted to make a loop for easier testing, but it was challenging to do given that the cable, although somewhat flexible, is still pretty rigid and we didn’t want any kinks. We used a 1km section and made certain to drape cable across bedrock, a wet and swampy stream environment, and a bushy section of tundra.  In snowy sections, the cable will sink into the snow a bit as the days warm and the black cable melts into the snow and soil,” Peterson says. “The next step is a lot of sit and wait.”

FIber optics cable must be tough to serve Alaska's bush villages. Peterson spooled fiber optics cable across a number of harsh environments.

Peterson will revisit the site periodically to see whether animals disturb the cable. A real-time camera will take snapshots of the weather that Peterson will use in his assessment of how cold temperatures (often more than -40C) might affect the cable’s physical properties as well as data transmission.

“If the cables stand the test of time, a lot of Alaska’s interior may someday see significant improvement in their Internet communication. Communications companies will be able to easily characterize line performance and send teams out via helicopter for repairs when needed,” explains Peterson. “Now, even places like Barrow rely on satellites for communications. Most scientists that have worked out of there will tell you that it’s easier to make a DVD of their data and send it to colleagues via air rather than to try to upload or download data in real time. Fiber optics technology would change that.”—Marcy Davis

Comments (0) Nov 28 2011

Halloween 2011 at Summit Station, Greenland

On the floor, from left: Sonja Wolter, Ben Toth, and Brad Halter. Next level up on the couches from the left: Christina Hammock, Tommy Cox, Lance Roth, Ken Keenan, Russ Howes, Ed Stockard, Katrine Gorham and Tracy Sheeley. Standing from the left: Shannon Coykendall and Ben Buchwald.

The team halted turnover activities temporarily last night at Summit Station to celebrate Halloween, and as the pictures attest, folks were clearly in the mood for a costume party. “We dined on a lovely Halloween themed-meal, complete with pumpkin ghoulash and mashed potatoes with sculpted ghosts,” wrote Tracy Sheeley, Summit manager of operations.  “Quite a celebration!”

Those who’ve enjoyed reports of optical phenomenon at Summit during the early winter phase might note that CPS science technician Christina Hammock (far left) is dressed up as a sun dog.

“Everything is going smoothly for turnover,” Tracy wrote. “We got in one day late due to weather, but are moving through everything steadily.  Temps are chilly (-55F/-48C, windchill – 93F/-69C, as I type) with 16kt winds. Great group of people for both phases.”

CH2M HILL Polar Services operates Summit Station, near the highest point on Greenland’s ice sheet, for the U.S. National Science Foundation, which manages the station in cooperation with the Government of Greenland. Summit houses instruments that provide year-round, long-term measurements for monitoring and investigations of the Arctic environment.  The station is open by invitation to visiting scientists during the summer, and is accessible via ski-equipped airplane and tracked vehicle. During the winter period, which lasts from September through early April, the station is closed; but a team of five maintains the station and its ongoing experiments. CPS breaks this winter period into three, roughly 10-week phases, and conducts resupply and intense training activities during staff turnover between each period.

“If all goes to plan, we will send Phase I out on Saturday and Russ (Howes, CPS’ Greenland maintenance manager) and I out on Sunday.” wrote Tracy. Good luck to the incoming Phase II team, and thanks and warm wishes–literally–to the outgoing Phase I team.–Kip Rithner

Comments (0) Nov 01 2011

NSF Awards Arctic Research Support and Logistics Contract to CH2M HILL Polar Services

We are as thrilled and energized as this Greenlandic Husky pup! Photo: Ed Stockard

CH2M HILL Polar Services (CPS) is quite pleased to announce that the National Science Foundation (NSF) awarded a contract to CH2M HILL Constructors, Inc., of Englewood, Colorado on 28 September 2011 to provide research support and logistics services for NSF-sponsored research in the Arctic.

Since 1999 CH2M HILL has teamed with subcontractors Polar Field Services and SRI International to form CH2M HILL Polar Services, or CPS.  A new partner—Ukpeaġvik Iñupiat Corporation’s UMIAQ—will join the CPS team for the contract period beginning in October 2011.

CPS will deliver pre-proposal field work estimates, risk assessments, logistics and operational plans, transportation, communications, safety training, telemedicine, engineering, design and construction, maintenance, field camp operations and personnel to groups working in the Arctic.

New team member UMIAQ is a subsidiary of Ukpeaġvik Iñupiat Corporation (UIC), the Barrow village corporation established under the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act (ANCSA) of 1971. UMIAQ will provide local support to researchers working in Barrow, Alaska and surrounding communities, including operation of UIC-owned facilities and the Barrow Environmental Observatory. UMIAQ understands the politics, culture, land use, regulations, and engineering and design conditions in arctic and subarctic Alaska and provides reliable local knowledge and expertise.

Visit the CPS website (http://www.polar.ch2m.com/ ) for more information about the company’s services.

For more information about the NSF arctic research program, visit http://www.nsf.gov/div/index.jsp?div=ARC.

Contact:

Mike McKibben, CH2M HILL Polar Services

303.885.4644, mike.mckibben@ch2m.com

CPS Program Manager

Comments (0) Oct 14 2011

Green Sky Over Greenland

September 27, 2011: Aurora and star trails over Summit Station, Greenland. Photo: Ed Stockard. Originally published on Spaceweather.com

Several folks sent a link to Spaceweather.com today because another image by Ed Stockard (long-time colleague and frequent field notes contributor) was featured on the site. Ed shot the image, republished above, earlier this week at Summit Station during a period of intense solar wind activity.

This image got me to thinking about the man behind the curtain. How’d he do that?

Ed says he used a Photoshop program that digitally “stacked” a group of photos into one image. He tinkered with the results, adjusting “contrast, levels, size, sharpening,” and so on.

“It did turn out pretty good,” Ed writes from Summit Station. “It was 133 photos of several hundred in a time-lapse I made that night. The time-lapse is really cool (in my opinion) but it is so large I can’t share that over the Internet. . . . I’ve done a few time-lapse, one last night at -40, the camera and timer survived but I’ve also been working on that aspect too—little tricks to keep batteries alive and equipment warm, etc. Fun stuff that keeps me out of trouble!”

Ed and four others are currently at Summit Station, up on the Greenland ice sheet, ushering the U.S. National Science Foundation-funded research station into the winter period.

Spaceweather.com says that Earth’s magnetic field (which responds to the charged particles emitted by the sun) will remain “unsettled” for the next few days. Keep that camera warm, Ed!—Kip Rithner

Comments (1) Sep 30 2011

In an image taken with a 360-degree-view fisheye lens, Ed Stockard stands observing a full-sky show, a circular halo called a parhelic circle along with 22 degree and 46 degree halos. Also present: a circumzenithal arc, an upper tangent arc, and a faint Parry arc. Visit http://www.atoptics.co.uk/halosim.htm and view the frequent and infrequent links on the left. Can you find them all? Photo: Ed Stockard

Marko Riikonen visited South Pole in 1998-1999 to film and study the optical effects of ice crystals in the atmosphere, which manifest visibly as halos across the sky. He was part of a team on an NSF grant led by Walter Tape, a mathematics professor from the University of Alaska, Fairbanks. On January 11th, 1999, the team hit the optical jackpot. An exceptionally bright halo display, which included several frequent and rare halos, appeared in the sky. Marko recalled that it lasted almost an hour—an unusually long time for such a magnificent display—and a good number of station folks came out to watch it. He termed the display an “exhausting experience.”

Riikonen had had his share of discovery prior to his trip to the South Pole; in Chile he witnessed the so-called Lascar display which had at least five new halos, and is still unexplained. Says Marko, “We tried to explain it with cubic ice, but that’s not the answer.”

Meanwhile, in 1999, a few months after Riikonen left South Pole, I found myself heading to Summit Station, Greenland, for the first time. In mid-March four of us went to open the research site after a winter hiatus.  Although I had seen some polar halos in Antarctica, I was totally unprepared for what I saw one day while grooming the skiway.

From Oct 15th 2001: Skiway flags salute a nice 22 deg halo with a sunvex parry on top. The wider “v” below is the upper tangent arc. Completing the photo is the partial parhelic circle and associated parhelion or sun dogs. A very faint helic arc is visible to the right. Photo: Ed Stockard

Looking out from the Tucker I saw two halos around the sun and a variety of arcs that I had not a clue about. I stopped the machine and got out. Looking around I could see what I know now is called a parhelic circle encompassing the sky. Literally, turning around in 360 degrees I could see this halo. I started talking to myself. I said words I can’t repeat in this article!

I climbed back in the Tucker but could only drive a short distance before I had to stop, get out and repeat to myself the words of absolute amazement. I didn’t know at the time how the arcs and halos formed. I don’t remember all of the individual sights I saw but that day stuck in my mind.

Fast forward, this time 12 years, to 2011 and I am now spending August to November for the second consecutive year here at Summit. I have spent quite a few years working for PFS/CPS in Kangerlussuaq, which is the logistics hub for the U.S. National Science Foundation’s research program in Greenland. I’ve been a frequent contributor to this blog from my photographic work there. Kanger, as we call it, has remarkable auroras but I’ve rarely seen halos in Kanger like those on top of the ice sheet at Summit.

A typical but beautiful 22 deg halo marks the first phase of 2011-2012 winter operations at Summit Station. Photo: Ed Stockard

A 22 deg halo with faint parahelion or sun dogs. Marko suggested I use a sun blocker, which I made from the lid of a 5-gallon bucket on a 12-ft piece of old bamboo. The blocker keeps the photos from washing out and being over-exposed. Photo: Ed Stockard

Marko Riikonen found my photos in 2010, after they showed up on Atoptics.co.uk and on my flickr.com site. He picked one to include in his new book on halos. He has mentored me in optical photography through this current phase here at Summit, often emailing with obvious enthusiasm. It has been a delight and inspiration having his insight and tips on photographs, as well as his explanations of the phenomena I’m witnessing and documenting.

Halos and arcs can be seen worldwide, but the varied and rare phenomena mostly occur at the higher latitudes.  In some remote places in the Arctic and Antarctic, scientists have to rely on the eyes (and cameras) of others. My work here at Summit Station during the early arctic winter has allowed me a unique vantage point to photograph atmospheric optics in detail, for enthusiasts and scientists such as Riikonen to gather more knowledge about them.

Halos can occur by moonlight too. Here, a fairly complex 2010 lunar halo display. Present and easily visible are the 22 deg halo, parahelic circle, parahelion or moon dogs in this case, the upper tangent arc and parry arc along with a lower tangent arc on the horizon. Photo: Ed Stockard

As this correspondence has developed Riikonens’ comments have introduced me to a new vocabulary: Wegener, Schulthess and Kern arcs; Tape infralateral arcs; and all kinds of halos. Riikonen says, “When the temps fall below -30 C, you probably will get some odd radius displays, like last year.” He also says my photos have advanced the field a bit: “The Greenland ice cap halo skies have been a question mark until your photos started coming along. You have already written you name in the halo history.”

Cool.

Riikonen himself is well embedded in halo history, living in Finland in an area that often sees halos. On the night of December 7 /8 2008 in Rovaniemi, Finland, five new halos were revealed. “It was a great night. The display was created with [a] spotlight in diamond dust. The diamond dust was so thick that the moon did not shine through, so the only possibility to see halos was to use the spotlight. The cystals were huge. You could look at them with [the] naked eye. I had never seen a high-quality diamond dust like that.”

Riikonen’s travels in search of halos have taken him to Resolute Bay in Canada and “the pole of cold” in Oymyakon, Siberia.  At Oymyakon, in 1997, the optics were found to be rather typical. In his words, “We went to look for halos in the extremely low temps. Well, they were nothing special. When it gets too cold, it is mostly just 22 halo.”

I asked Marko about climate change and the effects it may have on these optical elights. He answered, “The high cloud halos in Finland have gotten markedly poorer soon after we entered new millenium. We used to have a so-called ‘halo spring’ in April-May during which numerous good, high-cloud displays were observed, but now there has been no halo spring for almost a decade. The Finns have been observing halos since the beginning of [the] 1980′s, so it is three decades of data now. That is of course way too small of a sample to say that climate change is responsible for the better quality high-cloud displays famine. Maybe the first two decades were exceptionally high-quality and now we are back to normal. Or maybe that was the norm and due to the climate change high-cloud halos have become poor.”

The above links and the halos mentioned are only a partial list of what Riikonen has seen. Marko hopes others will also photograph the world’s wonderful sky and provide shots of little-seen and possibly never-photographed optics. To all in the Arctic, Antarctic and around the globe:  Keep the camera ready. . . Jot down a few facts with the photos—temperature, clouds and winds may help.  Share in Marko’s enthusiasm and put forth some good data with remarkable photos. You might even hit that optical jackpot.—Ed Stockard

Comments (0) Sep 29 2011

2011 PolarTREC teacher, Susy Ellison, samples spruce trees for a dendrochronology study in Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. All photos: Susy Ellison

Susy Ellison is the high school science teacher we all wish we’d had. With projects like designing and building an energy-efficient straw-bale classroom, installing solar panels on the school’s roof, and building a greenhouse (and growing things in it), Ellison is infusing her students with a strong sense of what she calls environmental literacy. Now in her 15^th year at Yampah Mountain High School in Glenwood Springs, Colorado, Ellison spent the summer with two teams of Alaskan researchers as a PolarTREC teacher, so this year’s class will, no doubt, be in for some fun and interesting science activities.

Ellison’s love for Alaska goes back to graduate school when she spent time in Prudhoe Bay studying how arctic foxes interact with nesting shorebirds and small mammals. Her field experience served her well this year as she traveled to the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge for a six-day NSF-funded tree-ring study with Kevin Anchukaitis and Angie Allen (Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory),  and to the Raven Bluff Site for two weeks with Jeff Rasic (UAF/NPS), William Hedman (BLM), and Ian Buvit (Central Washington University) for a NSF-supported study on early human settlement in arctic Alaska.

For the tree-ring study, field team members spent their time extracting straw-sized cores from standing white spruce trees in five sites spread over a few miles; Anchukaitis will compare annual growth rings from these cores with samples taken from fallen trees. By analyzing the thickness of annual rings, they will reconstruct North Slope climate and ultimately determine controls on the extent of arctic forest growth.

Traveling light - Ellison and Allen congratulate themselves on hauling all their gear in one trip.

“The tree-ring study was really interesting. Many scientists think that with climate warming and more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, trees might just grow and grow and grow, but new research says this may not be true. You can keep feeding someone, but it’s not going to make them taller,” explains Ellison. “I was impressed with how pretty simple science can provide pretty big answers. There were only three of us and we were just out there. We travelled light and fast. It was fun!”

Following a 10-day break exploring the Kenai Peninsula, Ellison joined Jeff Rasic’s team for a rainy and cool two week archaeological excavation near Kivalina.  Despite the soggy weather, the group made the best of things and worked hard to maximize their field time. In addition to searching for artifacts in one-meter square pits started during the 2010 field season, Ellison participated in a soil survey and in reconnaissance flights wherein the group looked for new archaeological sites.

“We usually hear that the first people to North America came from Asia via the Bering Land Bridge and then headed south. The Raven site is about the same age, about 12,000 years old, as the Clovis culture sites farther south. At Raven we looked, in particular, for these fluted spear points so that they can be dated and compared to similar Clovis-age points. The idea is that people may have moved back and forth between Alaska and southern North America rather than unidirectionally,” says Ellison.

“The similarity in these projects is that we were looking at old stuff, attempting to get information that can be applied to the present and, perhaps, predict future changes in the Arctic,” Ellison says. “The scientists were so passionate about their studies and the field season in Alaska is so short – they had to get it done. Everyone worked really hard to complete the work required in the short time period.”

Ellison tries to stay dry while recording soil profile data.

Now that a new school year is underway, Ellison is thinking about ways to share her PolarTREC experiences with Yampah. So far, she’s considering having students look at tree rings to determine Colorado’s long-term fire history. She would also like to take a group backpacking in Utah to see some archaeological sites close to home while considering what clues they might leave behind for future archaeologists to find.

Ellison’s school is run by the Mountain Board of Cooperative Educational Services, and serves students from four public school districts.  The school serves as an alternative to students who have been unsuccessful in other area high schools for one reason or another.

“Teaching science at Yampah is very challenging,” Ellison says. “Our classes are ungraded, which means that in one class I have students from all grades with all levels of science proficiency. I teach life, physical, and earth science so I have a lot of information to distill. Then, I put my own spin on it. I like to have an environmental focus with very hands-on projects. My experiences with PolarTREC have given me so many new ideas for how to communicate climate change issues and science research  to all my students, regardless of their science background.”—Marcy Davis

PolarTREC (Polar Teachers and Researchers Exploring and Collaborating) is funded by the National Science Foundation’s Office of Polar Programs and managed by the Arctic Research Consortium of the United States, or ARCUS. The program aims to give teachers professional development experiences conducting research in the polar regions with career scientists to boost the teachers’ content knowledge and to give them hands-on experience in scientific inquiry. ARCUS is accepting applications through the end of September from teachers and researchers interested in participating in the PolarTREC program during the 2012-2013 research season. Visit the ARCUS PolarTREC website for more information: http://www.polartrec.com/

Comments (0) Sep 23 2011