ak in the news: walrus, and now seals

Happy holidays folks, and sorry for dropping the ball here for a bit. There's actually been some interesting news about sea ice and mammals, thanks to AP's Dan Joling and the first tricklings, it seems like, of study on how this year's dramatic loss of ice has affected bears, walrus, and ribbon seals. Joling had this update on walrus, and this one on seals.
There was also a back-and-forth between Gov. Palin and a woman from the Center for Biological Diversity on what to do about polar bears, in contrasting opinion pieces.
I wrote a story last week on making solar power in our solar-deprived Far North. (It's getting lighter now, if only slowly.)

real cold

It's 32 below at my cabin tonight, the first real cold we've had this winter. For those who haven't had the pleasure of real cold, here's a few observations. The car light doesn't come on for a few seconds after I open the door, and the door itself doesn't close well -- something to do with the latch being a moving part. Extension cords get stiff. The moisture in cabin air instantly tops the saturation point of the outside air, and my glasses, chilled from a minute outside, freeze over with ice when I come inside. Every breath somehow feels like a nice deep breath. And you appreciate every time your car starts, and doesn't break down on the way home.

ak in the news: duck hunting and sun dresses

OK, I'm back. I had a few days off from work and flew 4,000 miles back to Massachusetts to see my mother and sister. There was a snow day when I was there, but from ice rather than snow. I thought back nostalgically when we had snow days from snow, and it seems those aren't gone completely. The East is getting dumped on now, and western Mass already has a foot.
I missed the Northern Alaska Environmental Center's protest "plunge" down a ski hill (pictured here), which didn't have great turnout but did make an AP story that ran around the world.
The NY Times had a good multi-media piece on observed changes in Missouri duck hunting, which had lots of voices from wildlife managers and hunters themselves.
National Geographic had some pretty amazing pics of permafrost.
And the AP wrote a story on sea ice, quoting the oft quoted and quotable Mark Serreze, and with the alarming premise that summer sea ice could be nearly gone by 2012.

ny times goes to barrow

The New York Times has a pretty exciting story about oil drilling bumping up against the whaling lifestyle in Barrow. There's even an audio slide show with some nice pics.

climate change 101

Please excuse my delinquent posting. I'm taking a class at the University of Alaska Fairbanks on climate and climate change, and last week was the final exam. I think I might have tanked it despite studying a fair amount. I completely missed the first question by confusing dynamical feedbacks, which deal with the transport of energy over latitudes, and biogeochemical feedbacks, which highlight the way biology can effect climatic changes.
Tuesday I have to give a half-hour presentation, which I've chosen to do on the Pacific Decadal Oscillation. The PDO is a pattern of atmospheric changes something like El Nino/La Nina but on a longer time scale and located primarily in the North Pacific rather than the tropical Pacific. It's important for Alaska because it caused at least some of a big jump in air temperatures in 1976, and confuses the question of how much the state has warmed in the last 50 or 100 years because of anthropogenic climate change. Some ignore the PDO as say, Look! Alaska is 4 degrees warmer now, while others point to the PDO and say, No sweat, it'll get cold again.
Today I had a scattered day of reporting that included interviewing an Alaskan environmental leader on Gov. Palin's environmental positions, blogging about the natural gas pipeline, covering a Ron Paul rally, doing a short profile of a woman from southern California, typing up the police report, and interviewing the brother of someone who was just killed by a drunk driver in Anchorage.
In my spare time, I've been cleaning my caribou skull to make a European mount.