KUCB - Unalaska

The nation’s sole heavy icebreaker arrived in Antarctica on Monday after a nearly three-month trip from Seattle.

The deployment marks the Polar Star’s 25th journey to the earth’s southernmost continent, supporting Operation Deep Freeze, an annual mission to resupply American scientists doing research near the South Pole, according to a Coast Guard statement.

Each year, the crew maneuvers the nearly 400-foot, 13,000-ton icebreaker to cut a channel to McMurdo Station, the U.S. Antarctic Program’s logistics hub. It carves through miles of ice, sometimes up to 21-feet thick.

This winter, the icebreaker’s 157 crew members spent four weeks breaking ice and grooming the shipping channel to the station, which was established on Ross Island in 1955.

The cleared route will enable two supply vessels to safely offload more than 8 million gallons of fuel and a thousand cargo containers. Together, the two ships carry enough fuel, food and critical supplies to sustain research operations throughout the year. Supply ships will return again during the next austral summer — the season in the Southern Hemisphere that runs from about November to February.

The mission marks the Polar Star’s first return to Antarctica since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, according to the Coast Guard statement.

Last winter, instead of going south, the 46-year-old icebreaker conducted an Arctic deployment, and stopped in the Port of Dutch Harbor for the first time since 2013.

It was the ship’s first winter Arctic deployment in nearly four decades.

The Polar Star patrolled Alaska’s Arctic waters, including the maritime boundary line separating the U.S. and Russia, to assert maritime sovereignty and security in the far north and train the next generation of polar sailors.

Last winter’s patrol was the farthest north any American ship has sailed in the winter months.

The Coast Guard has been the sole provider of the nation’s polar icebreaking capability since 1965, according to the statement. Commissioned in 1976, the Polar Star is the United States’ only heavy icebreaker. The Coast Guard is increasing its icebreaking fleet with construction of three new polar security cutters “to ensure persistent national presence and reliable access to the polar regions.”

The construction on the first new icebreaker is expected to be completed in 2024.

A collection of audio reels made in the Aleutian region in the 1970s was digitized and will soon be available online through the University of Alaska Fairbanks.

The recordings were part of a school project that started in 1977 when a group of Unalaska students and their teacher Ray Hudson started collecting texts about the culture, language and history of the Aleutians. They called themselves the “Cuttlefish Class” – a name they picked out together – and they called their project the “Cuttlefish Series.”

The students put together six hefty volumes meant to bring the island community and Unangax̂ culture into the classroom. They contain things like fishing stories, letters, recipes for alodics, an Unangax̂ form of fry bread, as well as memories from Makushin and the other lost villages that were forcibly evacuated during World War II.

For the most part, the book series is based on knowledge provided by Unangax̂ elders from around the region – a lot of which was documented on reel-to-reel tape.

A total of 59 audio reels were saved from the project. On them are things like teachings from elder Bill Tcheripanoff in September of 1977, who was recorded talking to Unalaska students about an ulux̂tax̂, an Unangax̂ skin-on-frame sea kayak. There are clips of friends and families playing games in their homes, as well as lists of words translated into Unangam Tunuu.

The recordings were housed at the Unalaska City School District for about two decades. In 1997, the reels were given to the University of Alaska Fairbanks and sat there for about another 20 years. But in 2020, Leslie McCartney, an associate professor and curator of the oral history collection at UAF, got a grant and started digitizing them.

“We were able to send these recordings out to a company to have them digitized in a professional manner at a sampling rate much higher than what we could do,” McCartney said.

Part of her job is to look after the library’s oral history collection, which contains over 15,000 recordings “on all kinds of different media, from wire recordings to magnetic tape to digital to video, you name it,” McCartney said.

Another part of her job is to decide which media from the collection needs to be digitized and when.

After getting the grant from the National Recording Preservation Foundation, McCartney said she asked her staff what content they had that was endangered.

“What have we got that might fit the bill?” she asked them. “And one of my staff suggested the Cuttlefish tapes, and I said, ‘Okay, well, let’s take a look at that.’”

Even after about 40 years of sitting around, she said the tapes were in pretty good condition, but she didn’t want to risk digitizing them in-house.

A lot of the recordings in UAF’s oral history collection aren’t labeled. Most of the time, McCartney and her small team have to do a lot of detective work just to find out what the originals contain – and that’s before they can even begin to digitize them.

But the Cuttlefish recordings are unique, said McCartney. That’s because Hudson – who has written extensively about Aleutian history and taught the Cuttlefish Class – still remembered many details about the recordings. So even though there wasn’t much written information available about the tapes, Hudson was able to tell McCartney who was speaking in each recording and why it was so important to preserve those voices.

“What we were really, really fortunate about was that Ray had been the one that recorded them,” McCartney said. “And I reached out to him, and he gave me absolutely tons of information about the recordings, which really helped me write the grant.”

The grant started in November of 2020. Ideally, McCartney said she and her team would have finished digitizing, cataloguing and getting the recordings online by about June, but things like the pandemic have slowed the process.

The tapes have all been digitized and are still being catalogued, meaning someone is writing and editing descriptions for each reel. McCartney says her group is also working on getting them online, but staff shortages and technical problems make it tough to say when exactly they’ll be available.

McCartney’s work will end once those recordings are online and she’s gotten word out to the community. She said she’s glad to help share these stories.

“They’re absolutely precious cultural recordings,” she said. “Not just for the people of that area, but the people of the world, for our cultures and languages everywhere.”

The Cuttlefish tapes will be available to anyone with a stable internet connection, through UAF’s online library catalog at some point in the near future.

Communities across the West Coast woke up Saturday morning to tsunami advisory alerts. An underwater volcano near the Kingdom of Tonga had erupted and sent waves thousands of miles across the ocean.

Waves of up to about three feet reached parts of Alaska by Saturday morning. But hours before those waves arrived, sounds from the blast reached the homes of many Alaskans — all the way from Juneau to the Aleutians. 

Iris Caldentey and her kids were sleeping peacefully in their home early Saturday morning in Palmer when she woke up to loud, strange noises.

“How I would envision Pearl Harbor sounded — just constant, boom, boom, boom,” she said. “I mean, it was intense.”

Could it be avalanche control? A burglar? Maybe the kids bouncing off the walls? Like many people, Caldentey had no idea what she was hearing.

“I went outside to check the cars because then I was like, well, maybe there’s a burglar trying to get into our cars. And they’re opening, closing the door. Not a very good burglar,” she said.

In Unalaska, Laresa Syverson woke to similar sounds and vibrations.

“I thought for sure it was my cat — like, what’s my cat doing? So he got blamed for most of it,” she said.

First she thought her cat, then maybe fireworks, then she thought it could have just been bass coming from someone’s car.

While Syverson says she wasn’t immediately alarmed, neither she nor Caldentey would have guessed that the sounds were coming from an underwater volcano erupting near Tonga.

But that’s what it was — an eruption so massive it sent sound waves and a tsunami throughout the Pacific.

In Alaska, the largest tsunami waves hit the Aleutians and the Alaska Peninsula. King Cove recorded waves just over three feet. The tsunami destroyed property in Hawaii and Japan, caused flooding in California and killed two people when the waves reached Peru.

Syverson says she saw on social media that people had posted about hearing similar things — and that the booming sounds were from an eruption in the South Pacific.

“To be honest, I still didn’t even really believe it after that until I saw the satellite images of the actual eruptions. I was like, “Oh, yeah, that’s probably what we were hearing,” she said.

But how did so many Alaskans hear a sound from so far away? The short answer is that this volcanic blast was so big it traveled thousands of miles.

For the long answer, Ken Macpherson has some good insight. He’s a scientist at the Wilson Alaska Technical Center at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. The center has listening stations and seismic monitoring all over the world.

But usually they’re listening for something completely different — they’re monitoring the world for secret nuclear testing.

“And of course, those sensors are good at detecting things like nuclear bombs, but they’ll also pick up any kind of atmospheric blast of volcano being a good example,” Macpherson said.

He says they pick up all kinds of earthquakes and landslides and volcanic blasts. He slept right through this one, but he says the listening sensor in Fairbanks picked up the blast. And it’s interesting because those sensors are built for listening to frequencies that are lower than human hearing.

Think of it like a foghorn. They have this very low frequency sound.

“And the reason for that is a long period or low frequency signal like that will travel a longer distance. For higher frequencies, they attenuate,” Macpherson said. “That is, they just kind of get filtered out by the medium that they’re moving through.”

In other words, a higher-pitched sound won’t travel as far.

“But it looks like this Tonga blast was so big that even a high-frequency signal that’s audible to the human ear was able to travel almost 6,000 miles to Alaska and be heard widely across the state,” he said.

Data from UAF researchers clocks the sound wave from the blast moving at roughly 700 mph.

“And so it still took a long time to get to Alaska, because that’s almost 6,000 miles away,” Macpherson said. “But around eight hours after that huge explosion down in Tonga, those sound waves started to arrive in Alaska.”

He says if he hadn’t seen that data for himself, he’s not sure he’d believe it.

“And to be honest, when I first heard reports of this being heard, I was like, skeptical of that,” Macpherson said. “But it looks like it was possible to hear it. And the timing looks right. And so it does seem like it was widely heard across the state, which is just amazing.”

Macpherson says it’s scientifically interesting, but it’s important to keep the human toll of such an event in mind. What sounded like a loud boom to Alaskans can be devastating up close.

And the true toll on the people on the islands nearest to the volcano still isn’t clear. Communications with Tonga have been largely cut off since Friday. Surveillance flights showed significant damage to boats and buildings along the coastline. The country’s capital is covered in thick volcanic dust. 

And many people around the world are still anxiously waiting to hear from friends and family on the islands. 

Michele Yatchmeneff knew she wanted to be an engineer from the time she was a teenager. Yatchmeneff grew up in False Pass and King Cove, in the eastern Aleutians. She was raised in an Unangax̂ household, living a subsistence lifestyle.

Right after high school, she enrolled in engineering classes at the University of Alaska Fairbanks in 1999. She was looking forward to it.

Almost immediately, she began to feel many of the other students didn’t want her there.

“You would have students either not talk to you, or look at you in a certain way,” Yatchmeneff said. “Sometimes it’s subtle, sometimes it’s actually a slap in the face. You get called ‘villager,’ you get called names.”

There are more Indigenous people living in Alaska than anywhere else in the United States. But Alaska Native students are vastly underrepresented on college campuses. And when it comes to Science, Technology, Engineering and Math — fields that are especially dominated by white men — Alaska Native students face even greater barriers to entry.

When Yatchmeneff attended school, there had only been two Alaska Native students who had graduated with engineering degrees from the University of Alaska system. She felt isolated being surrounded by students and faculty who didn’t look like her.

After a year, she transferred to Anchorage. But after a year there, she left Alaska altogether. She moved to Arizona and enrolled in Arizona State University, hoping it would be better there.

Instead, Yatchmeneff says the further along she got in school, there were even fewer women and people of color.

Yatchmeneff felt alienated — and she internalized the blame.

“I always thought it was my problem, why I didn’t belong,” Yatchmeneff said. “I always thought there must be something wrong with me, I must not be good enough.”

She says her grades began to decline, and that she even started losing interest in engineering.

Yatchmeneff moved back to Alaska. She was lost, didn’t know what to do, and wondered if she’d ever make it through college.

But then some friends told her about an organization that helps Alaska Native students in STEM fields. Her first meeting showed her a world she didn’t know existed.

“There were all these other students that looked like me, and they were all doing internships, and they were sharing what they did during their internships,” Yatchmeneff said. “It was like coming home.”

Since the Alaska Native Science & Engineering Program started in 1995, it has helped hundreds of college students with scholarships, internships and mentoring. They also have programs for elementary, middle and high school students.

After finding the program, Yatchmeneff finally felt she had the support she needed. She was able to earn her bachelor’s degree, her master’s and a doctorate from Purdue.

In 2015, Yatchmeneff became the first Alaska Native female engineering professor in the Department of Civil Engineering at the University of Alaska Anchorage. She’s earned awards from organizations like the National Science Foundation. And last fall, she became the executive director of Alaska Native education and outreach at UAA, working directly with the chancellor to help boost enrollment and graduation among Alaska Native students.

Alaska Native undergraduates earning STEM degrees has more than quadrupled between 2000 and 2018, according to a 2019 study by ANSEP. But even today, Yatchmeneff faces a lot of the same hurdles as when she was a student.

“A lot of the time, students still don’t think I have the credentials to be teaching, they still don’t think I fit their picture of what an engineer looks like,” she said. “So therefore, I must have cheated or I don’t belong.”

But not every student feels that way. Yatchmeneff says especially students from marginalized communities have told her it was because of her leadership, and because they saw someone who looked like them teaching the class, that they knew they belonged.

Yatchmeneff says that teaching and working with the school to support Alaska Native students is her chance to give back to her community.

“It’s an Indigenous value that we always give back,” she said. “Because I had the support and because I got help from people along the way … it’s full circle.”

Still though, there’s a long way to go.

“We’re just scratching the surface, Yatchmeneff said. “What you want it to be is that you don’t need a specific Alaska Native program for science and engineering. We shouldn’t need that,” Yatchmeneff said.

She added, “But until we’ve gotten to that point, we need programs like ANSEP to be there.”

A magnitude 6.8 earthquake hit about 58 miles southeast of Nikolski early Tuesday morning, according to the Alaska Earthquake Center.

Natalia Ruppert, an Earthquake Center seismologist in Fairbanks, said the quake hit at about 2:30 a.m. and was preceded and followed by more seismic activity.

“It triggered a very energetic sequence of aftershocks,” Ruppert said. “The largest aftershock was a magnitude 6.6 — about an hour after the magnitude 6.8 — at 3:40 a.m. today, and we are still recording seismic activity in that cluster.”

The center had recorded about 20 other earthquakes of magnitude 4 and above by about 10 a.m. Tuesday morning, she said.

“This is unusual,” she said. “We normally don’t see such an energetic sequence in such a quick succession.”

There’s no reason for Aleutian Island residents to be alarmed at the moment, according to Ruppert. But there is a small chance this sequence could be followed by a larger earthquake. She said the AEC will continue to monitor the seismic activity.

Ruppert advises that people stay alert and pay attention to earthquake activity in the area in case the sequence develops into something more serious.

No tsunami alert was issued, and as of Tuesday morning, Ruppert said none of the activity was large enough to generate a tsunami.

As of about 2:30 p.m., the U. S. Geological Survey had published 21 felt reports, which are online surveys the public can use to describe the location, intensity and overall effect of earthquakes. Reports were submitted by people in Nikolski, Unalaska and Akutan.

Two people from St. Paul have been charged with killing a toddler who was in their care, according to troopers.

Earlier this month, 2-year-old Joshua Rukovishnikoff was medevaced to an Anchorage hospital with a serious head injury, according to a report Wednesday from Alaska State Troopers. He died at the hospital and his remains were sent to the State Medical Examiner for autopsy.

Troopers say after a thorough investigation, they determined the child’s guardians, 31-year-old Steven Melovidov and 28-year-old Sophie Myers-Melovidov, had killed him in their home and attempted to mislead investigators over the course of the investigation.

Troopers traveled to St. Paul on Tuesday and arrested the couple. They were taken to the Anchorage Correctional Complex.

This is the second murder investigation in a matter of months in the remote island community of about 350 people. The toddler’s mother, Nadesda “Lynette” Rukovishnikof, died in St. Paul in September, said troopers spokesperson Austin McDaniel. The toddler’s father, Joshua Rukovishnikoff, was charged with second-degree murder, criminally negligent homicide and reckless endangerment.

Before that, there hadn’t been any homicides on the island since 2006, according to local police.

The City of St. Paul and St. Paul police declined to comment on the investigation into Rukovishnikoff’s death. The city said it’s an active and ongoing investigation being conducted by troopers.