Wesley Early, Alaska's Energy Desk - Kotzebue

Coast Guard officials are en route to a beach in Utqiagvik in response to a tar-like substance spill.

The spill was reported just past midnight Tuesday morning when a local resident posted photos to Facebook, said Kimberly Maher, a spokeswoman for the Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation.

“A private citizen in Utqiagvik was on the beach and noticed this tank that was on a line of tanks that is on the beach for coastal erosion,” Maher said. “And they noticed some black tar-looking substance oozing out of one of the tanks.”

Maher said officials are still examining the substance in a lab to determine what it is, but DEC suspects it’s black tar or asphalt. In the 1960s, local officials placed 38 2,500-gallon tanks on the Simmons Field Beach in response to coastal erosion from a storm.

“These tanks, all chained together in a long line, were repurposed and brought down to the beach and placed for erosion control, to help reduce additional erosion in the future,” Maher said.

Maher said DEC believes that this is a one-time occurrence, where large metal drums were used to protect against erosion. However, she said, similar makeshift coastal protection methods were common.

“In the past people have tried to recycle different types of things in order to do either streambank revetment or coastal erosion type things,” Maher said. “If you’re in the Fairbanks area and you’re floating down the Chena River you’ll definitely see some old vehicles that have been used for bank stabilization. So it was not an uncommon practice in the past.”

So far, one of the tanks has been confirmed to be leaking, but there’s evidence that another four tanks could have leaks as well. Responders observed evidence of corrosion and weathering damage on the tanks.

The day the spill was reported, North Slope Borough officials began shoveling the spilled substance into a 55-gallon drum and placed sorbent boom around the tanks to try to absorb some of the contaminant.

Maher said the tanks haven’t been removed from the site, but the area is blocked off as responders continue their investigation. The spill does not appear to be impacting local wildlife.

On Tuesday night, the state of Alaska saw thousands of lightning strikes.

“Most of the 3,800 lightning strikes were concentrated in the Northwest Arctic,” said BLM Alaska Fire Service spokeswoman Beth Ipsen.

Those lightning strikes sparked more than a dozen new fires in the region.

Ipsen says there are several communities in close proximity to new fires. A fire popped up about 27 miles northeast of Kivalina, where Ipsen says it might run into a local Native allotment.

“There’s some smokejumpers that are prepping that Native allotment in case that fire does threaten it,” Ipsen said.

Two other villages near fires are Selawik and Buckland. Ipsen says a team of smokejumpers deployed to the Canyon Creek Fire about six miles southeast of Buckland. The fire near Selawik is burning at Niglaktak Lake, about two miles away from the village. But Ipsen says the fire is burning on a peninsula.

“We don’t believe that it’s going to do anything, impact the neighboring community because it is surrounded by water,” Ipsen said.

Another five wildfires started near the mouth of the Noatak River, with a dozen smokejumpers deployed to the Mulik Hills and Hugo Creek Fires. The two are about a mile apart.

Ipsen says the biggest fire in the state has been burning in the Noatak National Preserve, about 120 miles northeast of Kotzebue.

“An estimated 11,000 acres,” Ipsen said. “And that estimation is from satellite imagery.”

She says right now, the fire isn’t threatening any buildings or allotments, and the fire service is letting it burn out naturally while keeping an eye on it.

Ipsen says temperatures have been warm, but the forecast should shift by Thursday.

“We do have rains forecasted starting Thursday and Friday — there’s I believe a 70% chance in some areas,” Ipsen said. “So that’ll definitely help with the fires.”

Any wildfires can be reported to BLM Alaska Fire Services by calling 1-800-237-3633 or to your local authorities by calling 911.

The U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled Thursday that the Trump administration was wrong to reverse protections for the Pacific walrus. The ruling will force federal agencies to reconsider what protections are warranted for the species as their ocean habitat warms.

The ruling comes more than a decade after the Center for Biological Diversity, a conservation group, first petitioned the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to list the walrus as endangered or threatened. In 2008, attorneys for the Center said that oil and gas development threatened the species, as did the melting of sea ice that walruses use for habitat.

Emily Jeffers, an attorney for the Center, says that in 2011, during the Obama administration, the federal agency initially agreed with the petition, but was too busy to take action on it.

“And then six years later in 2017, the Trump administration found that the species did not warrant listing under the Endangered Species Act,” Jeffers said.

One of the factors in measuring threats to the walrus is what constitutes a problem in the immediate future.

In the Obama administration’s original 2011 ruling, scientific models predicted substantial sea ice loss by the year 2100, causing walrus population declines.

In its reversal, the Trump administration said 2060 was a better timeline to measure the immediate future of walrus sea ice habitat. And while Fish and Wildlife acknowledged that the species was in danger of losing that habitat, the agency said it didn’t believe the risk was at a level warranting federal protections.

In their lawsuit, Jeffers and the Center for Biological Diversity said the Trump administration didn’t fully explain its justification for changing the timeline from 2100 to 2060. And in a 20-page ruling Thursday, the court agreed.

“The court said, ‘Fish and Wildlife Service, you did one thing in 2011, you did another thing in 2017,’” Jeffers said. “‘That’s the hallmark of agency decision-making, that you have to explain the reasons why you’re doing something. And here you just didn’t explain what you were doing.’”

The Pacific walrus remains a subsistence staple in Arctic Alaska Native communities, which harvest an estimated 5,300 walruses annually. Endangered Species Act protections for the species, if adopted, would not affect subsistence hunting for Alaska Natives. Jeffers says that while subsistence hunts have the potential to threaten the Pacific walrus, that risk is small.

“Climate change and sea ice loss is overwhelmingly the main threat to the species, not subsistence harvests,” Jeffers said.

With the new ruling, Jeffers says the Biden administration will have to reassess whether the Pacific walrus should be listed as threatened or endangered. She says the Center for Biological Diversity is confident that the agency will boost protections.

“I think that when they do have to go back and reexamine their decision, we’re very confident that they’ll find that the walrus warrants protection under the Endangered Species Act because the science overwhelmingly supports that,” Jeffers said.

If listed, the federal government would also have to designate critical habitat deemed essential to the species.

Sea ice in the Arctic serves as a habitat for polar bears and their prey, ice seals. The ice doesn’t follow international boundaries, and monitoring the migration of these species requires access to both American and Russian waters.

A collaboration between scientists from both countries is providing a clearer picture of the species, which remain subsistence staples to Arctic communities.

Irina Trukhanova is a wildlife biologist with North Pacific Wildlife Consulting. The group contracts with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

She says that polar bears and ice seals are loosely spread out across the vast Arctic, and it can be difficult to keep track of their movements and populations.

“The only time that you can actually look at those species in their natural habitat is springtime,” Trukhanova said.

That’s when the species travel on the sea ice in the Chukchi Sea.

However, U.S. researchers are normally restricted to U.S. boundaries. Researcher Paul Conn with NOAA says that the process can be limiting since the polar bears travel between sea ice in both Russia and the United States.

“The only ones that they collar are the ones that end up over near Kotzebue, so that is a knowledge gap,” Conn said.

In order to survey polar bears and ice seals across the entire Chukchi Sea, U.S. researchers with NOAA and Fish and Wildlife partnered with Russian scientists. The result was a 2016 aerial survey that observed the species populations and movements.

Using a combination of infrared technology with photography and visual observations, the researchers were able to track the distribution and abundance of the seals and polar bears. Conn says the results from the research give a more complete view of the mammals in the wider Arctic.

“It does give us a sense for where bears are in the spring in April, and having done surveys for seals at the same, we can see how important the distribution of prey is for the distribution of bears,” Conn said.

Moving forward, Trukhanova says that global warming will necessitate continuous research, as the Arctic warms faster than any other part of the world. That has led to diminishing sea ice for polar bears, and the ice seals they prey on.

“If it melts earlier, if the ice cover isn’t stable enough, then the survival rates for the pups, specifically for the ringed seal pups, become lower,” Trukhanova said.

The Alaska Nannut Co-Management Council, an organization of tribes that subsist on polar bears, praised the collaboration.  In a statement, Nannut Executive Director Katya Gray said  “… this effort is significant for its use of non-invasive methods to study polar bears, the importance of which our tribes and hunters are consistently raising.”

Trukhanova, who grew up in Russia and attended the University of St. Petersburg, said the data could not have been collected without collaboration.

“We were working together,” Trukhanova said. “We were planning the survey together, trying to make the methods compatible and make the results compatible so we could join forces and bring all the data to the table and get the robust joint results that we could use on both sides of the border.”

While the governments of both countries have had a sometimes tense relationship in recent years, Conn says he was impressed with the scientific community’s good-natured approach.

“You hear about Russia and us, and this antagonistic relationship, but when you actually get to the people it’s just amazing the amount of love they have for their science,” Conn said.

Results from the joint survey on polar bears and ice seals were published in the scientific journal PLOS One, part of the open-access Public Library on Science.

For the past decade, scientists have observed several years of abnormally low sea ice extent. While most of the cause has been attributed to a warming Arctic climate, a new study from the University of Alaska Fairbanks has found evidence that warming waters outside of the Arctic are impacting sea ice as well.

In the summer, there is a warm water mass that flows up from the Pacific Ocean through the Bering Strait across the Chukchi Sea. UAF marine science professor Harper Simmons says this transfer of warm water up into colder seas is normal.

“That flow is a natural state of the system,” Simmons said. “Unless things were really rearranged in the distant past.”

The water ends up resting in a layer just below the surface of the Arctic Ocean. Simmons says it stays there until the fall when colder water starts to form ice on the surface.

“That warm water makes its way slowly out of that layer and affects the ultimate amount of sea ice that forms in the Arctic,” Simmons said.

While that flow is normal, Simmons says there is emerging evidence that the warm water coming up from the Pacific is getting even warmer.

“Since the 90s, the temperature of that water has been observed to have a pretty significant warming trend,” Simmons said.

That trend translates to about half a degree Fahrenheit per decade. While that may not seem like a lot, Simmons says because it’s such a sudden change from years of stable sea ice conditions, it can be jarring to the system.

“If there was, in the past, kind of an expected sea ice formation of two meters of sea ice over the Beaufort,” Simmons said. “And this heat becomes part of that, then you would expect that instead of getting two meters of sea ice, you would only get a meter and a half of sea ice.”

These observations were made as part of a study conducted by the University of Alaska Fairbanks and the University of California San Diego’s Scripps Institute of Oceanography. Simmons says the major change between this study and studies in the past was the introduction of new CTD, or conductivity, temperature and depth, technology.

The process works the same as how scientists had done it in the past. Basically, researchers lower a package into the ocean to monitor conditions in the water.

However, Simmons says the new custom-made CTD technology from the Scripps Institute exponentially increases the amount of data that researchers can gather.

“In a traditional cruise, you could make hundreds of profiles, and with a package like this, you could make thousands,” Simmons said.

Several Alaska energy researchers will be featured in a national conference this week of the U.S. Arctic Research Commission.

One of the big topics of discussion will be how rural Arctic communities deal with energy and climate issues. Bruno Grunau is the director of the Cold Climate Housing Research Center in Fairbanks. He’s slated to introduce the climate, energy and equity keynote speeches on the first day of the conference.

“You know, we’re operating and looking in a place of the earth where people have been for 10,000 years and living sustainably for that long,” Grunau said. “So what we’re looking at here is what does the future look like, what does sustainable future look like in this part of the earth.”

Tim Leach is a contractor with the Arctic Research Commission. Leach said a lot of these issues related to renewable energy overlap with other chronic problems in rural Alaska communities like water and sewer problems, as well as issues dealing with infrastructure.

“Really with regard to both the provision of electricity and for heat,” Leach said. “Those are two focus areas within this energy sphere that we’re looking at in the conference.”

Deputy Director Cheryl Rosa with the U.S. Arctic Research Commission said that they are eager to hear from Arctic residents on the individual energy challenges their communities are facing.

“We’ve got remote communities, they’re all very different from one another,” Rosa said. “So there’s very rarely a one-size-fits-all solution for approaches to almost any technology or things that you’re trying to install in remote areas. And it’s very important to work with folks, learn what their needs are and figure out how to best address them, with them as part of the equation.”

The conference is free and will be held virtually from 8:30 a.m. to noon Tuesday through Thursday. Those interested in attending can register online. It will also be broadcasted live on Facebook.