13 August 2003

We spent the last four days with Alan and a bunch of scientists in a veritable yakfest, getting in all

the explanations for the science we've shot and the science we've yet to shoot. On Saturday

we were in the Bonanza Creek experimental forest with Glenn Juday and Val Barber who were

showing insect predation on drought stressed trees due to climate warming. We cored some

trees and looked at dead Black Spruce, and found some evidence of bugs.

On the 10th we were with Gunter Weller and John Walsh, climatologists at the UofA. We looked

at big picture stuff in the lab.

On the 11th we went to Fort Wainwright to meet Ken Tape and Chuck Racine, who are working

with Matthew Sturm on a bunch of aerial photos from the 40s, re-made modern photo sets and

compared the increase in shrub growth in the tundra. That was pretty dramatic. In the afternoon

we met Torre Jorgenson and took an airboat out to the Tannana Flats, an area where the

permafrost is turning to fen. After a half hour airboat ride where we saw a few moose and a

couple of golden eagles we were walking on spongy bogs among dying birch trees. Alan and

Torre ran a motorized coring tool about six feet into the ground and came up with loads of

frozen mud and layers of ice. It was a real surprise to see frozen ground just under this boggy

fen.

On the 12th we met Charlie Collins and went into the permafrost tunnel, built by the army corps

of engineers to test drilling methods for ICBM silos and such, in the 60s. They have preserved the

tunnel and have big refrigeration units at the entrance to keep it from melting in the summer.

There were plants and animal remains from 30,000 years ago, big ice ledges and places where

the ground had cracked in the summer, water had run into the crack and frozen, more cracking

the next summer, etc, making an angled ice lens with thousands of annual layers. We found Bison

and Caribou bones, along with roots, branches and sticks five thousand years older than the

pyramids.

Next we met Vladimir Romanovsky, who does permafrost temperature research. He has a large,

scattered group of boreholes drilled around the state. A typical borehole goes maybe two

hundred feet into the ground, with temperature sensors every meter. The sensors are all

connected to a data logger and they go suck up the data every year. We were out at one of the

boreholes and could see where permafrost ice had melted and the ground settled underneath,

causing deep ravines and gullies. The mushrooms in the woods were pretty cool too, lots of

what the Russians call "pad beriozik, or "under birch tree" mushrooms, which make great soup.

One I saw was probably eight inches in diameter. The photo on the picture page is an amantia

though. Its not the kind that will make you have to get a liver transplant if you eat it, but it will

make you pretty sick.

In the evening we interviewed David Yesner, one of the archaeologists from the Broken

Mammoth site south of Fairbanks. He had a collection of artifacts and talked with Alan about

some of the current controversies in early American archaeology: Correctly identifying artifacts,

dating, etc. He had a variety of tools from the site.

On the 13th we went to Glenn Juday's lab at UAF to see him analyzing tree cores like the ones

we got earlier. In the afternoon we went to the airport to shoot some aerials of the forests he

was talking about. The air service assured us we could shoot with the rear doors removed from

the plane, and so the pilot took off the doors, mounted a seat in the back for Peter, strapped

him and the camera in and got ready to taxi. Just as they were heading for the taxiway the air

service owner came out and told them they couldn't take off without a door, since they didh't

have the [nearly invisible to the eye] Cessna spoiler kit to install on the leading side of the door.

He was afraid the FAA would give them grief, and we had to go to Plan B, which involved Peter

sitting in the copilot seat and trying to shoot out the window, between the wing and strut. It

was pretty hopeless, but maybe they got something useful.