Former Alaska governor Sarah Palin may be remembered by history for any number of reasons. For one thing, she’s the one who signed a bill making February 2nd Marmot Day in the state of Alaska.

Unlike the groundhog, whose activities on February 2nd are said to predict the arrival of spring, the Alaskan marmot has no official duties associated with the date. The day merely serves to draw attention to the creature, a large ground squirrel and cousin of the groundhog that makes its home in Northern mountainous climes.

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A researcher holds a bison skull unearthed in the Arctic. Image via Astrobiology Magazine

New research indicates that, during the Pleiocene and Pleistocene eras, when most of the northern hemisphere was covered with ice, a swath of the far north remained relatvely ice-free, and was home to large grazing mammals such as mammoth, bison and Yukon horses.

This region, called Beringia, includes portions Alaska, Siberia, and the Canadian Yukon. As one of the few areas of the northern hemisphere that remained glacier-free, Beringia’s steppes played a crucial role in human and animal migration, as well as a refuge for plants and animals threatened by glaciation.

This sort of window into the Earth’s past gives scientists a better understanding of how climate change might affect life on the planet in the future. Over at Astrobiology Magazine, Aaron Gronstal notes,

Studying ancient climate conditions on Earth – and the ways in which life dealt with climate change – can help astrobiologists understand how current climate trends will affect the planet’s biosphere in the future. Environmental refuges like Beringia could have played an important role in helping life survive and evolve on our planet, even when conditions at the Earth’s surface were very inhospitable.

Life’s Ancient Island in the Ice. Via iO9.com

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Arctic Kingdom Team Members relax near Barrow Straight.

Smithsonian Magazine has a great cover story this month on “Alaska’s Great Wide Open.” It’s well worth a read, particularly for writer Pico Iyer’s meditiations of life out on the tundra:

A quiet place, I was coming to see, teaches you attention; stillness makes you keen-eared as a bear, as alert to sounds in the brush as I had been, a few days before, in Venice, to key changes in Vivaldi. That first Denali morning one of the cheerful young naturalists at the privately owned camp took a group of us out into the tundra. “Six million acres with almost no trails,” she exulted. She showed us how to “read” the skull of a caribou—its lost antler suggested it died before the spring—and handed me her binoculars, turned the wrong way round, so that I could see, as through a microscope, the difference between rushes and grass. She pointed out the sandhill cranes whose presence heralded the coming autumn, and she even identified the berries in bear scat, which she was ready to eat, she threatened, should our attention begin to flag.

via Alaska’s Great Wide Open | Travel | Smithsonian Magazine.

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Over on the Discovery Channel’s Earth Live Blog, Dr. George Divoky, a participant in International Polar Year’s Polar-Palooza outreach program and a scientist who has been studying Cooper Island’s Black Guillemot population for more than 30 years, describes some of the changes he’s seeing in the Arctic:

When presenting to school groups one of my tasks is to ask ”what is wrong with this picture?” as a PhotoShopped image of a polar bear walking behind some penguins appears on the screen. This summer, though not as incredible as the penguin/polar bear pairing, I find myself looking at the images obtained over the past month on Cooper Island and thinking “what is wrong with these pictures?” But I know that the images of polar bears walking around the colony, sleeping on the beach and approaching the campsite, things I could never have imagined before 2002,are the product of habitat degradation rather than any image manipulation.

When Dr. Divoky talks about polar bears “approaching the campsite, he isn’t kidding! The video below was taken by his camps’ motion-sensitive cameras at 3:30 AM.

Dr Divoky set up alarms to alert him to bears’ presence after bedtime, but that hasn’t prevented bears from doing damage to Black Guillemot nests and snacking on fledgelings. Sadly, these sorts of changes in animal behaviour are one of many everyday impacts of global warming already in evidence in today’s Arctic.

via Is It a Bird or a Bear? – Earth Live: Cooper Island.

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Environmental news can sometimes be depressingly bleak. So I was thrilled to run across this recent news item in the Smithsonian:

Whalers killed tens of thousands of blue whales before their hunting was banned in 1966. Today, the largest animals on earth are showing encouraging signs of rebounding. Identifying individual blue whales in the Pacific Ocean since 1997, scientists from the Cascadia Research Collective and elsewhere found that the animals are once again migrating from California to British Columbia and Alaska.

via: Wild Things: Life as We Know It | Science & Nature | Smithsonian Magazine.

Welcome back.

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In the spirit of the walrus dancing to Smooth Criminal, we bring you this video from the Toolik Field Station, in North Slope, Alaska. Apparently, dancing’s not just for pinnipeds and zombies anymore: Arctic Biologists are getting in on the fun, too.

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Listening to the radio late last night, I caught a snippet of the NPR program To the Best of Our Knowledge that explored what it means to have “a sense of place.”

The show featured several people who are, in one way or another, involved with finding or documenting the essence of a particular locale. My favorite, of course, was the brief segment recorded by Martyn Stewart, one of audio engineers who took part on the Arctic Soundscape Project, a record of the sounds of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge captured in 2006.

One thing Stewart said about his time on the tundra really struck me:

Read the rest of this entry »

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