Eideard

In America “storm-chasers” are the intrepid types who pursue tornadoes, and sometimes hurricanes. But the Arctic Circle has its aurora chasers – people who speed around in search of the best views of the aurora borealis, or Northern Lights.

“Last week we saw one that had everything – spiralling, curtains, ribbons, greens and reds, and the whole sky lit up. We were amazed at what was unfolding before us,” says Andy Keen.

Five years ago he left his job running a charity in the UK to move to Ivalo, a remote village in northern Lapland, Finland, latitude 68 degrees – two degrees above the Arctic Circle. “I saw a TV documentary about the Northern Lights. So I went there to have a look. Now I’m absolutely addicted,” he says.

Mr Keen’s company, Aurorahunters, now takes seven tourists a week on hunting trips in the Arctic wilderness to search for the Northern Lights…There are similar companies operating elsewhere in Finland and in neighbouring Norway where the official tourism website describes the aurora as “a tricky lady”. It adds: “You never know when she bothers to turn up. This diva keeps you waiting…”

When a location has been selected, Mr Keen and his group jump into minibuses and head into the wilderness, sometimes taking to sledges pulled by huskies to reach the most remote areas. They often see moose and bear tracks and have ventured as far north as the Arctic Ocean.

All to get the best vantage point to see the aurora borealis, named after the Roman goddess of dawn (Aurora) and the Greek name for the north wind (Boreas)…

RTFA. Details about the causes, predictions. Suggestions about chasing and photographing the elusive beauty of the aurora. All useful.

The sudden appearance of orange goo at an Inuit village in northwest Alaska has left experts baffled.

The substance first washed up on the shores of Kivalina, about 625 miles northwest of Anchorage, on Wednesday. It covered most of the harbour, attracting crowds of bemused residents.

On Thursday residents found the orange matter floating on top of the rain buckets they use to collect drinking water.

By Friday, the orange substance in the harbour had dissipated or washed out to sea, and what was left on ground had dried to a powdery substance.

Samples of the orange matter were collected in canning jars and sent to a lab in Anchorage for analysis. Until results are known, Kivalina’s 374 residents will likely continue to wonder just what exactly happened in their village…

Villagers have never seen anything like this before, and elders have never heard any stories passed down from earlier generations about an orange-coloured substance coming into town…

The Coast Guard already has ruled out that the orange material, which some people described as having a semi-solid feel to it, was man-made or a petroleum product.

That leaves algae as the best guess, said village administrator Janet Mitchell.

The concern is if it’s somehow harmful. What will it do to fish, which villagers will soon start catching to stock up for winter, or the caribou currently being hunted, or the berries..?

The village is also about 40 miles from the Red Dog zinc mine, but officials there assured the village the substance didn’t come from them.

Anyone looking for a reincarnation of Rod Serling?

UPDATE: Turns out to be a fungus among us. Perfectly natural.

A suspicious white substance in an airplane bathroom?

It could be anthrax, could be explosive residue or — as authorities in California learned Friday — it could be toilet paper.

The white dust appeared in the back lavatory of Alaska Airline’s Flight 508 soon after it took off Friday afternoon from Seattle, said Bobbie Eagan, a spokeswoman for the carrier. Sometime during the 1,000-mile flight, the flight’s crew notified authorities about the unknown substance and asked for help.

Fire department crews, law enforcement officers and hazardous materials experts circled the plane soon after it touched down shortly after 4 p.m. at John Wayne Airport in Santa Ana, California, according to Federal Aviation Administration spokesman Mike Fergus.

The aircraft’s 151 passengers and six crew members deplaned, and authorities climbed on board. They included members of the Orange County Fire Authority, who along with members of the county’s sheriff department tested the suspicious substance.

Capt. Greg McKeown, the fire department’s spokesman, said that authorities eventually determined that white dust actually was a “cellulose paper material” — or, in other words, what appeared to be toilet paper.

Phew. Another critical incident for Homeland Security successfully resolved. Probably only cost how much? $10,000? $20,000? Good thing we can afford all this security, eh?

An Anchorage police officer accused of being an illegal immigrant using a fake identity has been arrested and charged with passport fraud, federal prosecutors said on Friday.

The Anchorage Police Department patrolman known as Rafael Espinoza is in truth a Mexican citizen named Rafael Mora-Lopez, said Karen Loeffler, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Alaska.

The false identity was discovered after Mora-Lopez, 47, sought renewal of his passport, Loeffler said, and used suspicious information that triggered an investigation by the State Department and other federal agencies.

“We discovered that there were two people using all of the same identifiers,” she said.

Mora-Lopez was arrested on Thursday, immediately after the use of Espinoza’s identity was confirmed, and discharged from his job, Loeffler said.

Anchorage Police Chief Mark Mew said Mora-Lopez, posing as Espinoza, passed all background checks when he was hired in 2005, including fingerprint checks. Mew described Mora-Lopez as a “sterling” officer with a good reputation and a “very professional” manner.

Must have been a very “professional” fingerprint check, too.

Carl Gatto alongside federal highway project in Wasilla, Alaska

Backed by a blue row of saw-toothed mountain peaks, the Republican state lawmaker Carl Gatto finds himself on a fine roll.

Roll it back, he says, roll back this entire socialistic experiment in federal hegemony. Give us control of our land, let us drill and mine, and please don’t let a few belugas get in the way of a perfectly good bridge.

“I’ve introduced legislation to roll back the federal government,” he says. “They don’t have solutions; they just have taxes.”

And what of the federal stimulus, from which Alaska receives the most money per capita in the nation? Would he reject it?

Mr. Gatto, 72 and wiry, smiles and shakes his head: “I’ll give the federal government credit: they sure give us a ton of money. For every $1 we give them in taxes for highways, they give us back $5.76.”

He points to a new federally financed highway, stretching toward distant spruce trees. “Man, beautiful, right?”

Alaskans tend to live with their contradictions in these recessionary times. No place benefits more from federal largess than this state, where the Republican governor decries “intrusive” federal policies, officials sue to overturn the health care legislation and Senator Lisa Murkowski, a Republican, voted against the stimulus bill…

Alaska has budget woes, and, more perilously, oil production is slumping. But its problems are not mortal; the ax falls on new police headquarters and replacement Zamboni blades rather than on teachers and libraries. The state avoided the unemployment devastation visited on the Lower 48 in part because federal dollars support a third of Alaskan jobs, according to a university study.

RTFA. It should surprise no one.

Alaska is the northern terminus of the Bible Belt – where populism and greed feed off ignorant voters to maintain a veritable army of freeloaders at the federal tax trough.

Glaciers along the Gulf of Alaska are enriching stream and near shore marine ecosystems from a surprising source — ancient carbon contained in glacial runoff, researchers from four universities and the U.S. Forest Service report in the December 24, 2009, issue of the journal Nature.

In spring 2008, Eran Hood, associate professor of hydrology with the Environmental Science Program at the University of Alaska Southeast, set out to measure the nutrients that reach the gulf from five glaciated watersheds he can drive to from his Juneau office. “We don’t currently have much information about how runoff from glaciers may be contributing to productivity in downstream marine ecosystems. This is a particularly critical question given the rate at which glaciers along the Gulf of Alaska are thinning and receding” said Hood.

Hood then asked former graduate school colleague Durelle Scott, now an assistant professor of biological systems engineering at Virginia Tech, to help analyze the organic matter and nutrient (nitrogen and phosphorus) loads being exported from the Juneau-area study watersheds. “Because there are few reports of nutrient yields from glacial watersheds, Eran and I decided to compare the result from a non-glacial watershed with those of a watershed partially covered by a glacier and a watershed fully covered by a glacier,” said Scott.

Hood and Scott’s initial findings, reported in the September 2008 issue of the journal Nature Geoscience, presented something of a mystery. As might be expected, there is more organic matter from a forested watershed than from a fully or partially glacier-covered watershed. With soil development, organic matter is transported from the landscape during runoff events. However, there was still a considerable amount of organic carbon exported from the glaciated landscape…

“We found that the more glacier there is in the watershed, the more carbon is bioavailable. And the higher the percentage of glacier coverage, the older the organic material is — up to 4,000 years old,” said Scott.

Hood and Scott hypothesize that forests that lived along the Gulf of Alaska between 2,500 to 7,000 years ago were covered by glaciers, and this organic matter is now coming out. “The organic matter in heavily glaciated watersheds is labile, like sugar. Microorganisms appear to be metabolizing ancient carbon and as the microorganisms die and decompose, biodegradable dissolved organic carbon is being flushed out with the glacier melt,” said Scott.

A little bit of positive news as part of climate change. Fisheries may improve. Some fisheries.

U.S. President Barack Obama on Wednesday nominated Larry Persily, a veteran Alaska policy maker and former aide to former Governor Sarah Palin, to oversee plans for a massive, long-desired Alaska natural gas pipeline.

Persily, a former Alaska journalist, worked for more than a decade on oil and gas issues for three Alaska governors, including Palin, who was John McCain’s running mate on the Republican ticket that lost to Obama and Vice President Joe Biden in the 2008 presidential election.

Persily, currently is a resource specialist for the Alaska legislature, became a vocal critic of Palin after leaving her office. He famously likened her to Argentine icon Eva Peron…

Two groups are competing for rights and financing to build a pipeline carrying natural gas from Alaska’s North Slope to domestic U.S. markets…

TransCanada and Exxon are entitled to up to $500 million in state subsidies and the state is prohibited from negotiating with other potential pipeline sponsors, under the AGIA terms..

That’s the law passed by Palin which limits bidding to just those two corporations.

The other sponsor is a joint venture created by BP and ConocoPhillips, the two other major North Slope producers. That venture, called Denali, is proceeding outside of the AGIA terms.

As well as I recall, the Canadian portion of this hookup has been ready and waiting for years. If I’m wrong, surely someone will note the correction.

Regardless, time to stop flaring and start pumping southward – is overdue.

In documents filed this week in Alaska’s long-running political corruption investigation, the government’s lead witness said he had given thousands of dollars in gifts to “United States Representative A” — who could only be Republican Rep. Don Young.

Alaska, uh, only has one Congressional representative.

Bill Allen, a former oil services company executive, said he paid $10,000 to $15,000 a year from 1993 to 2006 out of VECO Corp.’s funds for the representative’s annual fundraiser in Alaska. The lawmaker, who has not been charged with any wrongdoing, did not list any such payments on financial disclosure forms…

Testimony and evidence provided by Allen, who is scheduled to be sentenced Wednesday on his 2007 guilty pleas to conspiracy, bribery and tax charges, has helped convict several Alaska state legislators and former Gov. Frank Murkowski’s chief of staff on corruption charges stemming from influence VECO wielded over pending legislation on oil taxes and other matters affecting the industry…

Young, 76, has never been directly identified by federal officials as a target of the probe, and he consistently has refused to publicly answer questions about it. His spokeswoman, Meredith Kenny, declined to comment, and Young’s lawyer did not return a phone call.

Young — Alaska’s only member of the House of Representatives — waved off a reporter for the Anchorage Daily News, which initially reported the new court filing. “Don’t bother me,” he said…

The House last year directed the Justice Department to look into a controversial earmark Young had attached to a 2005 highway bill, steering $10 million to study building an interchange of Interstate 75 in Florida near land owned by a major campaign donor and fundraiser for Young.

What? You thought corrupt politicians limited their crooked dealings just to their home states?

Sarah Palin blows fairy dust at Republican true believers
Daylife/AP Photo used by permission

Just one week after Sarah Palin stepped down as governor of Alaska, Alaskan lawmakers succeeded in overriding her veto of federal stimulus dollars.

The legislature has voted 45-15 in favor of overturning the former governor’s veto of more than $28 million in Recovery Act funds targeted toward energy efficiency projects.

The Alaska legislature met for a one-day special session in Anchorage. Heading into the vote, Rep. Mike Hawker, who voted in support of finally accepting the stimulus funds, anticipated a close decision, coming down to a couple of votes either way…

RTFA if you think you can penetrate the medieval curtain of ideology cloaking Palin’s brain.

State lawmakers dispute Palin’s objections to the stimulus money. In a letter to Alaska House Finance Committee Co-Chair Rep. Mike Hawker and obtained by CNN, the Department of Energy wrote that the Alaska legislature “does not need to adopt, impose and enforce a statewide building code” in order to qualify for the energy funds.

Palin originally threatened to reject more than $400 million of the state’s $930 million share of the stimulus package. Eventually Palin signed off on all but the three percent under consideration Monday by state lawmakers.

She would rather reject the portion of the stimulus that provides assistance to folks for weatherizing their homes – than deal with her fear of building codes. Another 14th Century mind in a 20th Century Republican skull.

Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) scientists studying shorebirds in western Arctic Alaska recently made a serendipitous discovery when they spotted a bar-tailed godwit with a small orange flag and aluminum band harmlessly attached to its legs. Further research revealed that scientists in Australia had banded the bird and attached the flag near Victoria – more than 8,000 miles away.

While banded birds are sometimes seen in the area where they were originally released, it is very rare to see them so far from a release site.

The observation was made by WCS biologists Dr. Steve Zack and Joe Liebezeit.

“It’s extremely unusual to find a banded bird that has flown literally thousands of miles from where it was released,” said Steve Zack. “While we know that birds from all over the world come to the Arctic to breed, to see a living example first hand is a powerful reminder of the importance of this region…”

“These sightings represent direct examples of the importance of Arctic Alaska as an international gathering place for migratory birds,” said Jodi Hilty, Director of WCS’s North America Programs.

“Birds from every continent and every ocean come to Arctic Alaska to breed during the short summer,” said Zack “The immense wetlands of western Arctic Alaska, encompassed almost entirely by the National Petroleum Reserve, are particularly important to migratory birds and worth conserving.”

At least the critter didn’t get stuck in an oil rig mud pit.