24 November, 2002

Emperors / Arctic Atlases / Polar Education Opps

News, resources, meetings, and opportunities (courses, competitions, graduate work, etc.) for the polar learning community follow.

NEWS

NSF PR 02-91

EMPEROR PENGUIN COLONY STRUGGLING WITH ICEBERG BLOCKADE

The movements of two gigantic Antarctic icebergs appear to have dramatically reduced the number of Emperor penguins living and breeding in a colony at Cape Crozier, according to two researchers who visited the site last month.

The colony is one of the first ever visited by human beings early in the 20th century.

"It's certain that the number of breeding birds is way down" from previous years, said Gerald Kooyman, a National Science Foundation-funded researcher at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, Calif.

Kooyman took aerial photos of the colony in August during the flight missions that preceded the official start of the Antarctic research season. He returned to visit the colony in October, after the season was underway, with Paul Ponganis, another NSF-funded Emperor researcher who also is at Scripps.

The photographic evidence and the scientists' observations on the ground, Kooyman said, indicate the colony has scattered into at least five subgroups. The disruption appears to be caused by grounding in the past two years of two enormous icebergs-B-15 and C-19-near Cape Crozier.

He said that two years ago the colony was home to approximately 2,400 adult Emperors and approximately 1,200 chicks. Aerial photographs showed the researchers the current distribution of the birds and the number of groups, but they did not provide details about the number of breeding birds and the conditions in the colony. Kooyman said the site visits confirm what the photographic evidence appeared to show: ice conditions produced by the collisions of the giant bergs with the shoreline forced the bird colony to break up into smaller subgroups and also indicated the numbers of chicks and breeding pairs is greatly reduced from previous years.

"The colony had been fragmented into at least five groups. I think that's a habitat problem," he said. "The habitat is disturbed from the previous years, and I think it stays that way."

But, Kooyman said, his visit showed conditions for the birds are not as severe as he expected.

"I was expecting to see just about total failure," he noted.

But a comparison with another Emperor colony at Beaufort Island, Kooyman said, also shows that the Crozier birds have been less successful finding food for their young.

"It looks like the development of the chicks has been slower than at Beaufort," he said. "And development is related to food sources. It looks like they were not as well fed." He also said that shifts in the ice might have caused additional fatalities.

"We could not find one group. It looks like they were in an ice canyon that was eliminated by two ice plates running together," he said. As to the fate of the birds, "It's a question of whether they got out of there or got crushed. It's impossible for us to determine that."

The Cape Crozier colony is noted in the history of Antarctic exploration. In 1911, three members of Robert Falcon Scott's ill fated South Pole expedition hauled a sledge 60 miles from Scott's base at Cape Evans to Cape Crozier, on the far side of Ross Island, in complete darkness and sub-zero degree (F) temperatures, to acquire three unhatched Emperor egg from the colony. At the time, Emperors were thought to perhaps represent an evolutionary "missing link" between reptiles and birds.

Kooyman the recent survey of the colony was conducted in "very demanding" conditions almost exactly a century after that episode. Airlifted to the ice near the colony by helicopter, "we took three days in fine weather to traverse the entire area because the ice was so broken up." The period of fine weather was followed by a summer storm.

Kooyman and Ponganis will compare notes on the health of the Emperor colony with David Ainley, an NSF-funded researcher who, as part of a long-term study on Adelie penguins, has been following the effects of the icebergs on Adelie colonies.

Ponganis noted that the icebergs causing the environmental change affecting the Emperor colony appear to be moving away from the area. But he added that the opportunity to study their effects on the birds adds to scientific knowledge of Emperors and their ability to adapt to change.

"It's an incredible natural experiment as far as the physical effects on the colony and how they deal with it," he said. "Crozier is a good test of all kinds of conditions that Emperors can deal with."

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KILIMANJARO'S GIANT GLACIERS IN PERIL

Cores extracted from the ice fields of Africa's Mount Kilimanjaro are yielding clues about past climate in the region and, together with recent data, helping to forecast the future of the mountain's glaciers. A new study suggests that between 11,000 and 4,000 years ago, the region was generally warmer and wetter than it is today but experienced three major droughts in that time period. In addition, the scientists suspect that Kilimanjaro's ice cover could disappear by 2020 if current climate conditions persist.

http://sciam.rsc03.net/servlet/cc?lJpDVWAElopiilmFkpJLDLKNE0EU

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ALASKAN GLACIERS MELTING FASTER THAN PREVIOUSLY THOUGHT

Rising sea levels are bad news for residents of coastal communities and island nations. Precise predictions of future conditions in these areas are vital for policy formation, but scientists are not yet certain exactly why this phenomenon is occurring. To address the problem, researchers from around the world are working to quantify the contributions of various melting ice masses, but so far data have been skimpy, leaving conclusions drawn from them fraught with uncertainty. To that end, a new study conducted in Alaska presents a significantly more comprehensive analysis of the contribution of mountain glacial melting to rising seas. The findings are ominous: most glaciers have been thawing at an increasingly fast pace since the 1950s, and the Alaskan group has itself caused a significant increase in sea levels.

http://sciam.rsc03.net/servlet/cc?lJpDUCTElopiilmFkpJLDLKNE0EV

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RESOURCES (Books, Web Sites, Maps, Electronic Databases, etc.)

Visit the US Global Change Research Information Office (GCRIO) website http://www.gcrio.org/whatnew.html. Access includes United States Record of Action to Address Climate Change Domestically (http://www.gcrio.org/OnLnDoc/pdf/record_of_action.pdf) and the United States Global Climate Change Policy (http://www.gcrio.org/OnLnDoc/pdf/climate_factsheet.pdf)

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Check out new postings at the Cold Regions Bibliography Project http://www.coldregions.org/indexnet.html

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British Antarctic Survey - Antarctic Schools web pages: http://www.antarctica.ac.uk/Schools/SchoolsPack/index.html

The contact email address is schools@bas.ac.uk

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http://ku-prism.org/BearsOnIce/

This site allows students to experience Antarctica through the eyes of two Geobears, Berkley and OzGold, who sailed on the Aurora Australis with their Australian, friend and helper, Gordon Bain. Berkley came from Illinois from the 4th grade classroom of Betty Trummel, while OzGold came from Gordon's home in Tasmania. These Bears have traveled to Antarctica and back, have had many adventures and have lived to tell the tale. They have brought back information and photographs that will help you share their adventures. The bears will post their information every weekday starting October 21. We hope that students in Grades 4-6 will follow along. There is no cost for parcticipating. Check out the photo pages, first-hand accounts, and data pages!

Also a reminder that the Antarctic Division's "Classroom Antarctica" on-line learning resource is also up and running - <http://classroomantarctica.aad.gov.au/>http://classroomantarctica.aad.gov.au/ Any comments on the resource appreciated.

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CRYOFRONT, the Electronic Journal of Cold Region Technology, can be viewed at: http://www.members.shaw.ca/cryofront/cryofront.htm

CRYOFRONT VOLUME 4, NUMBER 2 is available on the website. The feature arcticle is Canadian Forces Station Alert: Engineering at Canada's Frozen Edge, by Ken Johnson.

Cryofront is an award winning electronic journal of cold region technology. Ken Johnson, M.A.Sc., P.Eng. is the publisher and editor of the journal, and may be reached at cryofront@shaw.ca. Ken Johnson is also a Land Use Planner and Environmental Engineer with EBA Engineering Consultants Ltd. in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. CRYOFRONT is published occasionally (and more if time permits), and distributed to an audience of over 700 cold regions technology practitioners around the world.

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The Arctic Environmental Atlas has presented environmental information on the Arctic region in an interactive map on the Internet since December 2000. The map has been updated with a new interface, more extensive data themes and new features. It is accessible at:

http://maps.grida.no/arctic

New in this revision are an interface for desktop software to access the map, updated data on the human impact on the Arctic, access to a database on national parks, and much more.

The themes in this map primarily concentrate on issues like biodiversity and conservation -- where the Arctic has a special status, with vast expanses of still untouched nature, important fish stocks and large seabird colonies. Other environmental problems that the map touches upon are ecological footprint, land based pollution and climate change.

The major sources used are some of the best global publicly available collections of data and maps, that have been collected and projected to show a polar view, and implemented in this interactive map service. The Arctic Environmental Atlas also draws from work that UNEP/GRID-Arendal has done for various Arctic projects over the years, in everything from conservation to pollution monitoring.

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A new geospatial dataset, the Alaska PaleoGlacier Atlas, is now available online:

http://instaar.colorado.edu/QGISL/ak_paleoglacier_atlas

The APG Atlas is a GIS-based summary of Pleistocene glaciation across Alaska. Visit the website to view statewide and regional maps depicting the extent of glaciers during the late Wisconsin glaciation (i.e. the Last Glacial Maximum, about 20,000 years ago), as well as the maximum extent reached during the last 3 million years by valley glaciers, ice caps, and the northwestern Cordilleran Ice Sheet. Deposition and erosion by glaciers in the recent geologic past have greatly influenced Alaska's landscapes and ecosystems.

Feel free to download print- and screen-resolution versions of featured maps. Also available are shapefiles and coverages for use in Geographic Information Systems (GIS).

See: http://instaar.colorado.edu/QGISL/ak_paleoglacier_atlas

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ATLAS Project Ivotuk Site CD

The Arctic Transitions in the Land-Atmosphere System (ATLAS) Project is a coordinated program that will examine the geographical patterns and controls over climate-land surface exchange and develop reasonable scenarios of future change in the Arctic. This CD is a compilation of information and measurements made at the Ivotuk site on the North Slope of Alaska by a hard working group of scientists and technicians. It contains data, pictures and descriptions for a 2 1/2 year period from 1998 through June 2000. It includes information from several disciplines including meteorology, hydrology, ecology, biology and chemistry

The CD is likely to be of interest to scientists, educators, students and anyone else interested in the scientific research being done in this region of the Alaskan Arctic.

This CD was produced by the UCAR Joint Office for Science Support (JOSS) in collaboration with the ATLAS project scientific investigators. This work was sponsored by the National Science Foundation Office of Polar Programs. If you would like a copy, please send email to or contact:

Vanessa Carney at JOSS

carney@ucar.edu

Fax number: 303-497-8158

Phone number: 303-497-8987

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Barren Lands: An Epic Search for Diamonds in the North American Arctic By Kevin Krajick

464 pages. List price: $16.00 ISBN 0805071857

Owl Books paperback

(Hardback: Henry Holt & Co., October 2001, $26)

The deepest mysteries of the earth-and of the human heart-are plumbed in Kevin Krajick's riveting true tale of the 450-year-search for a North American diamond mine, and the two men who finally found it, in the remotest reaches of the Far North. In the late 1970s, these treasure hunters set out on a twenty-year quest, along a fabled path that had defied 16th-century explorers, Wild West fortune-seekers, and modern geologists. They were an unlikely team: Chuck Fipke, a fanatical prospector with a singular talent for finding sand-size mineral grains, and Stew Blusson, an ultra-tough geologist and helicopter pilot. Inventive, eccentric and ruthless, they followed a 5,000-mile trail of clues left by predecessors from backwoods Arkansas up the glaciated high Rockies, into the vast and haunted barren lands of northern Canada. There they outwitted the immense De Beer cartel to make one of the world's greatest diamond discoveries-setting off a stampede unseen since the Klondike gold rush.

A story of obsession and scientific intrigue, Barren Lands is both an elegy to one of earth's last great wild places, and an unforgettable journey for those who, in the words of a nineteenth-century trapper, "want to see that country before it is all gone."

KEVIN KRAJICK is a prizewinning journalist whose arcticles have appeared in National Geographic, Newsweek, The New York Times, Science, Discover, Audubon, Smithsonian, and many other publications. He was a finalist for the National Magazine Award for Public Service, and won the American Geophysical Union's 1998 Walter Sullivan Award for Excellence in Science Journalism. He lives in New York City.

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Environmental Impact Assessment in the Arctic

A Study of International Legal Norms

By Timo Koivurova

To order a copy of this book see the Ashgate Publishing website: http//www.ashgate.com