Category: environment

ICASS X abstract deadline JANUARY 20, 2020 (EXTENDED)

Do you work with some aspect of people and permafrost?  There is a session on that topic at ICASS X (Arkhangelsk, June 15-20, 2020).  The deadline for abstracts is extended to January 20, 2020!

The session is called “People and Permafrost in a Changing Arctic.”  The session abstract shown on the website is a placeholder that hasn’t been updated yet.  The up-to-date version is below.

Apply here (under the Abstract Submission link) : https://icass.uni.edu

People and Permafrost in a Changing Arctic

For thousands of years, permafrost has been a constant in most of the Arctic.  Communities and lifeways have literally been built on the assumption that it would endure in perpetuity.  Now, in response to recent warming trends, permafrost degradation and its numerous societal and environmental impacts are becoming widespread.  Coastal bluffs eroding into the sea, roads like washboards or washed away, fill collapsing around pilings supporting public infrastructure, archaeological sites and cultural heritage thawing and rotting, and ice cellars thawing and flooding, are only some of the effects becoming commonplace across the Circumpolar North. 

This session will bring together interdisciplinary research focused on changing permafrost and its impacts on people and landscapes as well as human resilience and adaptation in Arctic coastal permafrost areas. We seek to develop synergy between researchers  interested in these topics and expand PerCS-Net (Permafrost Coastal Systems Network), an international network of researchers dealing with permafrost systems in transition. We welcome papers covering various aspects of these issues, from identifying new types of social and environmental disruption to  monitoring to attempts at adaption.  Contributions from community members and holders of Indigenous knowledge and local knowledge and researchers successfully engaging directly with Indigenous communities are particularly welcomed.

Deadline is January 20, 2020.

Apply here (under the Abstract Submission link) : https://icass.uni.edu

—

Climate Change and Cultural Resources seminar (SAA members only)

As usual, things have been busy. One of the things I’ve been busy with was an online seminar for the Society of American Archaeology on “Climate Change and Cultural Resources.” Despite some connectivity issues, it went off well. SAA records these seminars, and you can watch them if you are a current member. You will need to be logged in to the SAA web site member section to access the archive. The climate change one is here.

National Climate Assessment 4 is released

Black Friday wouldn’t seem like the ideal day to release a report as important as this, but there it is.  This report is Part 2, covering Risks, Impacts and Adaptation in the US. It is based on a massive amount of scientific study, as detailed in Part 1, which was released last year.

For those who don’t have time to read it, the short version is that things are going to get really bad soon in many parts of the US if we don’t turn this car around.  Fires, floods, coastal erosion & flooding and declining property values along the coast, climate refugees, heat waves that kill people, infrastructure collapse, agricultural failures with decreasing food security and increasing food prices, and so on.  And the knock-on effects of all that will impact places and industries that maybe aren’t feeling direct effects, so the economy will shrink. Not a pretty picture.

It won’t be just Arctic peoples’ cultural heritage and valuable scientific information that gets lost.  It will be public infrastructure and homes and food sources and drinking water.  The problems that we are seeing here in North Alaska now will most likely be coming to a place near you soon if enough isn’t done to change things.  This really isn’t the sort of thing to be gambling on.

The way it is set up, you can download executive summaries of the whole thing and of each chapter, but not the whole report or whole chapters.  They have to be read online.  Not much thought given to folks who live in rural communities with low bandwidth and/or super expensive internet ($299/month for 5Mb/sec and a 100GB data cap anyone).  If it could be downloaded, costs and the downloaded documents could be shared.

 

 

Call for Papers for SAA session on Environmental Change Impacts

I’m back from over a month in the field, and just got the Committee on Climate Change Strategies and Archaeological Resources (CCSAR)-sponsored session set up for next spring’s SAA meetings.  The session abstract is here.

We are looking for papers. If you are interested and have a paper you think might fit, contact me!

NB.  The hard deadline is coming up fast (September 6, at 3PM ET) and you will need to be registered and with fees paid to be accepted.  You don’t have to renew/establish your SAA membership right now, but will need to do that by the end of January 2019 to give the paper.

Antiquity article out!

A group of us have been working on an article on climate change and the effects it is having on archaeological sites and the cultural heritage and environmental information they contain.  It has finally been published in the journal Antiquity.  It is open access, so you can read it here.  Local sites, especially Walakpa, make an appearance.

Papers wanted–Climate Change & Archaeology Session

SO late last year I submitted a session proposal on Environmental Change Threats to Alaskan Cultural Heritage.  I never heard anything, so I assumed the session wasn’t accepted and what with the holidays & the knee replacement, I didn’t try to solicit papers.

I just learned that the session was accepted, so I am looking for participants.  The organizers are being kind enough to give us a couple of extra days past tomorrow’s deadline, but this has a pretty short fuse.  The abstract is linked here, but in short, I want to get a conversation started about this issue.  In many ways, Alaska has more at risk, sooner, than most of the rest of the US or most of the rest of the world, but we seem to be responding more slowly than places like Scotland or Florida or California.  I am hoping for papers that either highlight sites that are being or have been destroyed (you don’t need to have completed excavation & analysis), or showcase specific ways that communities, agencies and/or archaeologists have tried to deal with the issue.  We should have time after the papers to actually start a discussion on ways to deal with this problem beyond simply noticing it exists.

Please send abstracts to me (amjuics@gmail.com) and to Andy Tremayne (Andrew_Tremayne@nps.gov).

Contact me (amjuics@gmail.com) if you have any questions.

 

Trying to get into the field

We have been getting gear ready for days.  The next challenge is to get it (and ourselves) to the field.  The weather and equipment have not been cooperating.  The shore fast ice is just really melting this week, so we hadn’t been able to take anything down before.  Then the wind changed to the west, leading to one helicopter-assisted rescue in front of my house and ice against the shore.  We staged gear in the “yellow shed” (a small warehouse shared by archaeology and the ARM program) and we waited.  Yesterday, the wind went east for a bit and pushed the ice off the beach, so we rushed to load the UIC Science boat Crescent Island and sent heavy, durable & waterproof things down to the site.  Four of the crew went along and they and the two UICS logistics staff who were running the boat put the stuff in a secure spot and headed home just as the wind changed back.  They made it before the ice came back in.

IMG_4149
Crescent Island loaded up at NARL.  The John Deere is just for moving her and a sister boat, and is the only tractor in town.

IMG_4158
Launching the boat.

IMG_4176
Crescent Island under way on her first working trip for UIC Science.

Today, the wind wasn’t as strong as predicted, so Kaare and a bunch of the crew were going to head down with a little more gear, set up tents, and Ben Fitzhugh, Garrett Knudsen, Zac Peterson & Katie Daniels were going to stay and start stripping sod.  We packed up after lunch, but various ATVs decided to not behave (one only wanted to run well in reverse) so it took a while.

IMG_4179
Kaare loading the trailer while Zac looks on.

IMG_4182
Garrett and Katie getting ready to bring up the rear (and pick up anything that falls off).

By the time they got to Nunavak it was pretty late, and the stream was still really deep to cross, but it was draining, so they came home and will try again tomorrow.  We may try to do two trips to get more folks down, but there will be one more boat trip Sunday or Monday, so some folks will go down that way.

Meanwhile, I had discovered that the newly-returned batteries for the transit were really not in as good shape as the tests at the surveying equipment shop indicated.  I spent some time chasing down replacement batteries.  In the end, GPS Alaska had a charger for the new batteries in stock, could order me new batteries, and had two that they use which they are renting to us at a very low price until our come in and get shipped to us.  My boss is in Anchorage and going to fly his plane up, so he was able to pick them up and bring them along.  All the other stuff is in decent shape, so we should be able to work and record what we are doing.

Walakpa Zooarchaeology

Last week I went to the Alaska Marine Science Symposium 2017 meetings in Anchorage.  I’ve never gone to those meetings before, but we were presenting two posters on finds from Walakpa.

amss2017
At the poster session.  Photo courtesy Raphaela Stimmelmayr.

One was on the results of the necropsy of a mummified seal found in a 1944 ice cellar.  I was excited about it because it was pre-bomb with a pretty tight date and therefore helpful for refining radiocarbon correction factors.  It turns out to be the first mummified seal reported from anywhere outside the Dry Valleys of Antarctica!  Who knew?

patou_amms2016_final

The second was presenting some preliminary results of investigations on a polar bear skull which eroded from Walakpa, and was recovered and turned in by Kenneth Brower.  It turned out to be somewhat unusual in shape, as well as being really big (maybe the 4th largest ever measured).  That bear must have been HUGE!

theoldone_amms2016_final

 

Workshop at the World Conservation Congress

After we got back from Walakpa, we had fieldwork in both Deering and Wainwright, which kept me pretty busy.  After that, I had to head to Honolulu for the World Conservation Congress.  I had organized a workshop on Global Environmental Change Threats to Heritage and Long Term Observing Networks of the Past.  The timing of the conference was a bit unfortunate, since it overlapped with the World Archaeological Conference in Japan, so the workshop was fairly small.  However, the idea was to get some of the people who are active the conservation field to  look to the paleoecological data from archaeological sites to help build realistic conservation plans.  It was pretty well attended and on top of that, it was live-streamed.  The video is now up on YouTube for your viewing pleasure.

Honolulu was quite a switch from Alaska, with temperatures in the 80s the whole time.  It was beautiful, of course.

IMG_3512.jpg
Rainbow on the walk back to the hotel after the workshop.

IMG_0614.jpg
Another rainbow from the balcony of the hotel room.

On the other hand, it was nice to get home to Alaska.  The sunsets are better.

img_3564img_3572