Interior

The Fish Creek Fire in Interior Alaska isn’t much to look at. It’s about 7,500 acres in size, sitting about an hour south of Fairbanks near the twisty Tanana River. The main fire front — the made-for-TV part, with torching trees and pulses of orange heat — flamed out more than a week ago, leaving behind a quiet charred landscape.

But the fire is far from over. It’s one of nearly 300 fires still burning in Alaska, after a spectacular lightning storm late last month sparked hundreds of blazes and a wave of fire larger than any in the state’s history — nearly 5 million acres in total.

And though the Fish Creek Fire looks benign, with little wisps of white smoke as its only sign of life, it’s not.

A little fire like this could have a huge impact on the surrounding environment and ecosystem — not just here in Alaska, but across the planet.

Hidden Masses Of Organic Matter

“It’s really a different kind of fire,” says Teresa Hollingsworth, a research ecologist and professor at the University of Alaska Fairbanks.

The Fish Creek Fire is mostly done burning the trees and brush above ground and has moved on to the organic matter underground — organic matter that goes, Hollingsworth says, “meters and meters deep.”

That’s why fires in the higher latitudes, in places like Alaska, are different than other wildfires. Here, Hollingsworth explains, the vegetation above ground is just the tip of the iceberg.

There are layers and layers of organic material called duff — things like pine needles, grasses and trees — that have fallen and accumulated on the forest floor over time. They haven’t fully decomposed, like they would in a place like Florida, because of the frigid temperatures.

In places, the duff can pile up to be feet deep.

Below that duff, there’s permafrost — which, as the name implies, is permanently frozen ground. It can include dirt, rocks and water, as well as trees, twigs and mammoth bones.

The result, Hollingsworth says: There can be way, way more organic material, or biomass, below ground than there is above.

And all of that biomass is made up of carbon — the same carbon that’s a leading cause of climate change.

A Frozen Carbon Threat

That’s why ecologists and climatologists are watching this year’s fire season with so much interest.

Roughly 4.7 million acres of boreal forest and land have burned in Alaska this summer. Millions more have burned in Canada, where scientists estimate half of the land is underlaid with permafrost.

In total, more than 11 million acres have burned between the two places — an area roughly the size of Connecticut.

Fires in the subarctic are nothing new. The vast majority of the land burned by wildfire in North America every year is in Alaska and Canada, far from cities and towns.

Still, Alaska has never seen that much fire so early in its fire season. And many of those fires are burning with greater intensity.

That’s worrying to research ecologists like Ted Schurr, a professor at the University of Northern Arizona who spends his summers in Alaska studying permafrost.

“It’s understood that there’s about twice as much frozen carbon [in permafrost] as there is in the atmosphere, to the tune of about 1,700 billion tons of carbon stored frozen,” he says.

Put in context, he says, there’s maybe another 2,000 billion tons of carbon stored in soil and vegetation in the rest of the world.

“The Arctic and the boreal regions are a hotspot of carbon that’s stored in the biosphere that has some vulnerability of ending up in the atmosphere as the climate changes,” Schurr says.

One of the more rapid ways a climate or ecosystem can change, he says, is through fire.

Solid Permafrost Gone Shaky

A good example of that can be found just a half-hour drive from the Fish Creek Fire, in a wide, densely vegetated area called the Tanana Flats, south of Fairbanks.

Merritt Turetsky, a research ecologist from the University of Guelph in Canada, runs a field site there.

She kneels on the spongy, springy ground and starts sawing through the surface with a long knife, cutting away at that duff layer that’s burning in many of the fires around the state.

“Feel how dry that is,” she says. “I mean, we had rain last night and it’s still this dry. This stuff burns like crazy.”

She cuts more of the earth away, reaching into the hole up to her elbow. The dirt at the bottom is cold and wet, which means it’s the layer just above intact permafrost, Turetsky says.

She grabs at a piece of the rooty soil she just cut away.

“This is 40 centimeters of a blanket that protects [permafrost] from what’s happening at the surface,” she says. “But when a fire comes through it might remove 15 or 25 centimeters of this organic mat.”

The result is a thinner blanket — providing less protection for the permafrost below.

That’s particularly problematic given the changing climate in the planet’s higher latitudes. Alaska has already warmed by more than 3 degrees Fahrenheit in the past 50 years, rendering much of the permafrost here unstable.

Fire makes it even worse, Turetsky says.

For proof, she walks just 10 yards away, through thick trees to a bald patch a few acres in size. As she walks from the forested area to the open area, her steps slow and her feet sink. Each step comes with an accompanying splash.

“We call that a quaking bog,” she says. “It’s like you’re on a waterbed.”

It’s a thin layer of vegetation on top of muddy, soupy water — water that was frozen in permafrost not long ago.

Can The Ecosystem Compensate?

Turetsky is here with a group of graduate students and researchers from the University of Alaska Fairbanks to determine why the permafrost thawed.

They take core samples of trees around the bald spot’s perimeter and samples of the water below that thin layer of vegetation.

Nearly all of the samples show signs of a fire that burned through the area maybe 40 years ago: a fire that burned off that top layer of duff, leaving the permafrost vulnerable to the hotter temperatures of the last couple of decades.

Now, Turetsky says, all of the carbon that was trapped in that permafrost, frozen in time, is available to be put back in the atmosphere.

What that means is debatable. Some scientists think that the ecosystem will be able to compensate for all of that new carbon with new plant life. They point to an increase in the number of hardwood trees in Alaska, which grow faster and absorb more carbon, as a potential sign of that.

Other scientists, like Turetsky, are less optimistic. She does believe that the environment can compensate for the carbon that’s released when a fire burns up trees and brush, and even the carbon that’s been piling up for hundreds of years in duff.

The carbon that can get released from thawing permafrost, though?

“The atmosphere thought it lost that carbon and all of a sudden it’s being returned to the atmosphere after a prolonged period of time,” Turetsky says.

“That’s the kind of carbon pulse to the atmosphere that actually can invoke additional climate change, above and beyond human emissions.”

And more climate change, she says, could mean hotter temperatures, which could mean more fires, which could mean more permafrost lost.

Copyright 2015 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

The City of Fairbanks has launched a new webpage to share and generate information about unsolved murder cases. Local police are tracking cases that are months or decades old.

The new section of the City of Fairbanks website covers 14 cases dating back to 1983 when the city began keeping reliable records. Detective Peyton Meredith updated the city council on the cases, including the murder of John Kavairlook Jr. outside a local bar in May.

“This is not a cold case. This is an unsolved case that we’re currently working on. It’s one of those ‘slow but steady wins the race’ cases, but we’re getting there. It’s only been a couple of months,” Meredith says.

Meredith also pointed to the a few other cases he says city police have made progress on, including the 2004 killing of Edward Sikvayuguk in a camp off Trainor Gate Road.

“Edward Sikvayuguk? I know who killed him,” Meredith says. “To be bluntly honest right now that case needs to be resubmitted to the district attorney’s office, period.”

Meredith described the 2003 murder of Fela Avery, who was found shot dead off the Old Richardson Highway, as the most solvable of the cold cases.

“It’s going to take some time. It takes a little bit of effort. We know where the suspect is; there’s a lot of evidence in that case … it’s just kind of missing that one little piece to put it all together.”

Three city police detectives are responsible investigating unsolved cases as well as all other violent crimes in the city, a work load that often leaves little time for older cases. Meredith described what motivates the detectives.

“Finding justice for these families, and not only the victims but their brothers and sisters we stay in contact with.”

Meredith only provided cursory details about the active cases. City spokeswoman Amber Courtney stressed that police can only share case information with the public that does not endanger detective’s ability to investigate.

The Alaska Village Electric Cooperative is moving ahead with its plans to build a wind farm for St. Mary’s and Pitkas Point, after receiving the necessary funding through Fiscal Year 2016 state capital budget.

A $4.3 million appropriation of state money remained in the trimmed-down capital budget throughout the legislative session, even as other projects were cut.

AVEC President and CEO Meera Kohler says the money was never in serious jeopardy because it is actually a re-appropriation of money previously set aside for another project.

While waiting for the money to be delivered, Kohler and AVEC managers are hammering out some important details about the design of the wind farm.

“We haven’t decided exactly what wind turbines we are going to use,” Kohler said. “The plan is to use the Northwind 100-B, but we are also contemplating a larger machine. But we will have to make that decision by December of this year.”

The St. Mary’s wind farm has a proposed capacity of 400 kilowatts of electricity from four separate turbines. But even if the plans change to use larger turbines to create more electricity, Kohler is confident that any excess electricity won’t go to waste.

“There’s plenty of demand for electricity as heat to absorb the excess production, as long as we can do it for equal or less than what we budgeted for the smaller turbines, in terms of cost,” Kohler said. “So producing additional wind power is never really a significant deterrent”

A separate plan aims to connect the electrical grids of St. Mary’s and nearby Mountain Village, which would broaden the customer base benefitting from wind power.

St. Mary’s will still have to operate diesel generators to supplement the power coming from the wind farm, but Kohler predicts that AVEC members in that area will see lower utility bills as a result of the project.

AVEC estimates that wind power saves 25 to 35 cents per kilowatt-hour compared to diesel power.

Kohler expects the wind farm to be operational by the end of next year.

The University of Alaska Fairbanks will take ownership of Gakona’s High Frequency Active Auroral Program, also known as HAARP.

After two bumpy years waiting for the U.S. Air Force to decide what to do with HAARP, the university has won its bid to take over the facility for research purposes.

About a year ago UAF, with the support of scientists around the globe, managed to delay the Air Force’s plan to close and demolish the HAARP compound.

UAF spokeswoman Marmian Grimes says the university will take ownership of the $200 million facility next month.

“It’s a transfer, and next month the facilities and equipment will formally transfer from the military to the university, and then we have two years to work with the Air Force to come to an agreement to transfer land,” Grimes says.

The university must still negotiate with the military for 1,500 acres of land out of the 5,500 acres the Air Force owns in Gakona. The university system is loaning UAF $2 million dollars to get the facility back into operation. Grimes says a plan is in place to raise money to cover the loan and costs associated with operations.

“Scientists would pay to use the facility for their research projects, and that would support operations; that’s a common model for the university and research community,” Grimes says. “The Sikuliaq, which just recently came on board, uses the same sort of model. We use the same model at Poker Flat research range as well. We are also working to identify some anchor tenants to help cover operating costs.”

Head of UAF’s Geophysical Institute, Bob McCoy, has been instrumental in persuading the Air Force to give HAARP to the university.

“The government’s invested about $290 million federal dollars. In the last decade or so, the Navy, the Air Force and DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) all chipped in $40 to $50 million each, and they expanded it and increased the power and made improvements,” McCoy says. “So it really is exquisite. It’s a good catch for the State of Alaska and the University in Fairbanks to get this excellent facility, and both the chancellor and the president both saw that, and were eager to have this added it to our portfolio here.”

HAARP is one of only three similar facilities in the world.  One is in Norway and another in Russia.  Research into the Earth’s ionosphere was the primary job at HAARP when the Air Force operated it. In June 2013 the military announced research was coming to an end and made known its intention to shutter HAARP.

Last July, HAARP was saved days before bulldozers were ordered to move in. Grimes says scientists rallied to put pressure on the Air Force to scrap the demolition plan.

“National Research Council has been involved, we’ve spoken to the National Science Foundation, as well as a wide variety of scientists regarding the possibility of keeping the facility open and running it as a university facility. We’ve found a lot of support there. The scientific community wants to keep this facility. It’s regarded as the best in the world, more powerful than the other two facilities,” Grimes says.

UAF faculty and graduate students have used HAARP for research over the past few years, and now the university plans to expand programs there. Bob McCoy says HAARP turns the ionosphere into a laboratory.

“There’s a lot of science that can be done. The Navy, in the past, has been interested in using the ionosphere like an antenna to generate extremely low frequency waves to communicate with submarines, even things like creating simulation in the ionosphere to modulate radio waves. There’s a whole bunch of applications,” McCoy says.

HAARP has been beaming radio waves into the atmosphere since 1997 in an effort to understand the ionosphere, which has a strong influence on satellite communications. But its mission is often misunderstood, and has given rise to speculation that its work is linked to top secret military research.

The longstanding Alaskan campaign to restore the name “Denali” to Mount McKinley got an unlikely endorsement Thursday.

For decades, Ohio Congress members have blocked the name change. William McKinley was from Ohio, and Ohioans have argued that renaming the mountain would dishonor a martyred president.

On Thursday, one of Ohio’s largest newspapers called on the Buckeye State to stand down. The Columbus Dispatch calls Ohio’s insistence an “unseemly effort on behalf of a politician who never set foot near the mountain and had no known interest in it.”

The editorial suggests that if the peak is officially named Denali — a moniker that pre-dates the United States — maybe the National Park handle could be changed back to “McKinley.” The newspaper reasons that the park was a creation of the government and might serve as a more fitting tribute to the 25th president, who was killed by an assassin’s bullet in 1901.

Sen. Lisa Murkowski has added the name change to the Interior Appropriations bill. She also sponsored a stand-alone bill to do the same.

An Alaskan scientist is part of a mission to explore Pluto, the last major planetary object in the solar system to be visited by an unmanned spacecraft.

New Horizons, launched in 2006, is expected to fly by Pluto July 14 and provide the first-ever views of the distant dwarf planet.

Peter Delamere, a space physicist at the University of Alaska Fairbanks Geophysical Institute, says he’ll be thrilled like everyone else to see the new, fresh images sent back by the probe at the climax of its 3 billion mile journey. But Delamere will be most interested in how particles from the solar wind can provide clues about the composition and strength of Pluto’s atmosphere as those particles stream around the dwarf planet.

Interview highlights

Delamere has been with the New Horizons mission since its start in 2001: He says it was driven by research speculating that Pluto may have an atmosphere. “While this may have an atmosphere, it’s thought to be an escaping atmosphere,” Delamere says. “It may be something that was similar to Earth’s primordial atmosphere in a state of what’s called hydrodynamic escape.”

How can they find out more about Pluto’s atmosphere? The solar wind’s supersonic flow slows down and creates a bow wave or bow shock when it collides with a planetary object like Pluto. As the solar wind flows around Pluto, Delamere says it may create a cavity on Pluto’s lee and ionize any particles streaming away from a weak atmosphere. Protons or ionized hydrogen from the solar wind may pick up and carry along ionized nitrogen from Pluto’s atmosphere. Methane may also be an atmospheric component.

Particles in the bow wave around Pluto can be measured with two particle instruments on board New Horizons: Huge amounts of particle data will be collected by the spacecraft just as it flies by Pluto and into the wake of the bow shock, but that data will be sent back to Earth in a trickle that may last months. During the actual fly-by, priority will be placed on sending back high-resolution imagery. Particle data from New Horizons will also be compared with information sent back by both Voyager probes, which are now in the heliosphere or near the interstellar space boundary.

What is space physics? Delamere says it’s essentially the study of the space environment from the Sun to the Earth. “We look at the space around the stars and how the Sun interacts with the Earth, and how the solar wind streaming from the Sun interacts with the Earth’s magnetic field,” Delamare says. “All of that is related to the study of auroral physics.” Delamere says he got into the field of space physics after watching the aurora when he was an undergraduate student in Minnesota. He says he eventually researched how Jupiter’s moon Io interacted with the gas giant, and later examined the aurora of Jupiter and Saturn.

Go to NASA’s New Horizons website for the latest news, images, and fly-by countdown clock