That’s it. It’s snowing.
We had a serious amount of snow last winter, although I’m not sure if it was an all-time record or not. By a couple of weeks ago I was beginning to get a bit worried. We’ve started work at Nuvuk in June some years ago, but it was pretty miserable. We’re starting in early July this year, but at the rate the snow was melting it was looking as if we might still have snow patches on the ground when we started.
However, we’ve had some warm sunny weather the last couple of weeks, and the snow is melting. Patches of tundra are starting to show through; people are heading inland after geese. We drove out to the end of the road to take a look at Point Barrow. I was happy to see lots of gravel showing. Once the gravel starts to appear, it absorbs lots of heat, and the snow melts faster. Given another month, we should be in good shape.
It was misty when we drove out, but I think it was a mist from snow ablating (going from solid to vapor directly). It happens here a lot on warm days, resulting in mist rising from the ground as well as from puddles & ponds.
Tomorrow, May 11, the sun will set at 2:08 AM and rise 21 minutes later. It won’t set again until early August.
This does not mean that there aren’t many inches of snow still on the ground, however…
It’s the first day of Piuraagiaqta today. It’s Barrow’s Spring Festival. I was sort of stuck in the office working, but it was a gorgeous sunny day, with ice crystals hanging in the air. I looked up during the afternoon, to see one of the best ice halo displays I have ever seen. I didn’t have a camera with a wide-angle lens, so I could only get part of it in one shot.
Then my camera battery died. I didn’t get a good picture of the outer 46º halo. The whole display looked a lot like the Parry 1820 display.
But just then, as I was turning to go back inside in disappointment, I heard a snow bunting singing! I couldn’t see him, but he was there, and so I know spring is too.
For a community of 4400 or so souls, perched on the edge of the Arctic Ocean at the very “top of the world” as we like to say (or at least the top of the US), Barrow is astoundingly multi-cultural. Iñupiaq, as you might expect, and various strands of Euro-American culture, but there are also many residents who originally came from the Philippines, and other Pacific islands. Then there are members of other Native American groups who often got here by meeting a Barrow person at one of the boarding schools to which the BIA (Bureau of Indian Affairs) used to ship students off for high school (in places like Chemawa, Oregon, or Kansas), marrying them and moving to Barrow. We not only have four Iñupiat dance groups, but also a Polynesian one. Pancit shows up at many gatherings. We have a Mexican restaurant, a Thai restaurant, a sushi bar, two Chinese restaurants (both run by Korean families) and two pizza places, plus Brower’s Cafe, which has a fairly eclectic menu including burgers and Korean food..
In recent weeks, that multicultural aspect of Barrow has meant that one could get more exposure to a variety of cultures than one would in an Anthropology 101 class. Aside from the Sweden/Denmark/Bavaria travelogue I did as part of the BASC Schoolyard Saturday, there was a presentation on Aspects of Krishna in four styles of four styles of Indian (subcontinental, not American) art given by a whale biologist from the NSB) North Slope Borough) DWM (Department of Wildlife Management), a talk on Papua New Guinea and various tribes given by a pilot for NSB SAR (Search and Rescue) who had spent two years there flying for a missionary group when he was younger, and a talk on the Netherlands, given by a Dutch social anthropology grad student who is in Barrow doing field research.
Yesterday, ConocoPhillips Alaska and Statoil were holding a public meeting in the conference room of the BARC, where my office is. The folks holding the meeting help with a few things, and came by my office. Two of the Statoil people were Norwegian, and when they introduced themselves, I automatically introduced myself using the Danish pronunciation of my name. We chatted a bit with me speaking Danish and them speaking Norwegian. One of the Barrow people at the meeting had a Norwegian grandfather (I think) and so that was fun.
For the past week, the weather has been fairly unfortunate here in Barrow. We had a snow day on Wednesday. It was a total whiteout,with so much snow blowing around that I could barely see my car out the front door, let alone the
house next door. The UICS staff discussed it and decided to hold off until after daylight to go to work (so we could at least have a chance to see drifts). By that time, UIC and everybody else had closed for the day.
The weather improved Wednesday night, but no loaders had been heard at NARL by the next morning. I called into the regular teleconference with one of our clients, and then headed for the BARC. Good choice. The drift across the drive was huge. I headed back to my house for snowshoes.
Fortunately, the ARM project has a telehandler with a bucket. They also have a contractor who is trying to finish an upgrade to the BARC instrument platform and is a bit behind schedule. Once the telehandler was dug out and the area around the ARM duplex was clear, Walter brought the telehandler over to the BARC drive. One and a half hours later, he had a single lane through the drift and place for me to park, so I went in. Susie, who’s filling in as the UICS temporary admin assistant, came out in a cab.
The wind was already rising and the barometer dropping again. I went home at for a quick lunch, and there was already a drift at my door.
The snow was sculpted in very interesting ways, which had gotten more elaborate while the car was out of the way.
I went back to work, but by 3 PM it was getting really nasty with low visibility. I told everyone it was time to head home, since the road from NARL was going to get bad (and Susie and I would be spending some time at the BARC with the contractor if we didn’t get out ASAP). Shortly after that, they closed pretty much everything in town for the day.
We were closed for everything all day today (Friday), too. I managed to get a few things done and written from home. We’ve canceled lab for tomorrow, since the loader has only been working enough to get a path for the water and sewer trucks to get the residential huts, and the BARC is undoubtedly behind a huge drift again. We haven’t actually gotten water or sewer trucks, mind you, but they can at least come tomorrow.
My husband’s weather day was interrupted by the news that something had blown in in the BASC Bldg. 360 server room. He went over on foot (falling into snowdrifts that he couldn’t see without glasses) and eventually got a repair crew organized to come secure the room so snow didn’t keep blowing in and wreck the servers. They had to turn off an air conditioner, but that didn’t seem to be a real problem, given all the cold air that was coming in everywhere.
The wind is finally going around to the north, with temperatures dropping, and even a little bit of sunset sky showing! It’ll be a chore to get to work on Monday, no doubt, but that is the Arctic. The entire North Slope was under blizzard warning for a couple days. That was a huge storm, apparently bigger than any they’re recorded for a decade or more.
I was lucky enough to get an upgrade from Alaska Airlines, so at least I wasn’t bent up like a pretzel all the way to Barrow. They weren’t any too quick about getting the baggage out, and no-one was to be found to issue the Baggage Service Guarantee vouchers after the 20 minutes had passed, so we took my bag when it showed up (after about 1/2 hour) and went home.
Luckily, today was a holiday so I could sleep late. Once up, there was the usual post-travel laundry pile to start on. Once that was underway, I had to dig out my car. There had been a blizzard in Barrow on Friday, which had blown snow into our arctic entryway, among other places.
It had also blown all over my vehicle, which required significant digging out. Apparently the blowing or subsequent plowing had somehow packed snow around my left rear mudflap, since that shattered when I pulled out (only went forward) although I didn’t discover that until I got home.
The wind had apparently also caused some pretty significant ice push from the Chukchi Sea onto the beach. You can see it in the background of the photo above. The ice is black in places because it was frozen to the bottom. The ice is very thin for this time of year. In some places it is probably 20 or more feet tall.
Once I got to work I caught up on emails, drafted a “mission statement” for a working group on coastal erosion I am helping to organize (contact me if you are interested–it’s global, not just Arctic in focus), worked on an encyclopedia article a bit, and took care of things like time-sheet approvals which can be a time suck, but are fairly important (we all like getting paid!).
This penultimate chapter is a bit belated, to say the least, due to holidays, much travel and associated presentations, and proposal preparation. However, there were some very interesting papers on the final day as well, and I decided I needed to get this written before yet another conference happened. And I needed a break from final tweaking of the PowerPoint for said conference.
The first paper was by Molly Odell, on economic change at Mitksqaaq Angayuk between 3400-100BP. The site, on Kodiak, seems to have had discontinuous occupations from Early Katchemak to the Russian occupation. Molly focused on the fauna from a midden associated with an Alutiiq house. The house seemed to have been occupied primarily by men, based on the artifacts. The midden showed a change from a pre-contact mixed fishery (primarily cod but with significant amounts of salmon and small amounts of other locally available fish) to a fishery focused almost entirely on cod in the historic period. Molly interprets this as a shift from a winter settlement to a cod-fishing camp, presumably staffed by men.
Jennifer Raff gave a paper on mitochondrial aDNA (ancient DNA) from the Lower Alaska Peninsula & Eastern Aleutians. This is interesting, as there are disagreements about how/when various cultures in that area appeared, and whether or not they represent in situ (in place) developments or population replacements. This work may help settle some of those questions. Not to spoil any surprises, as this paper is being published, but both haplotypes A & D are well represented, and there is B from one site!
Rick Knecht, a fellow Bryn Mawr College PhD, gave a “just out of the field” talk about excavations at Nunalleq, a Yup’ik site in the Yukon-Kuskokwim delta. The Yup’ik culture is quite well-known ethnographically, but almost no archaeology has been done in the area. Nunalleq, for which there is a date of 1300BP (not sure if that’s calibrated or what it’s on or associated with) has extraordinary organic preservation at the moment, but is suffering erosion, which is accelerating due to permafrost melting and sea level rise. The local community actually contacted the archaeologists in concern. The 2010 season excavated a house, with lots of organic artifacts (rye grass matting, for example) present on the floor. They think it might have been a men’s house, which are known for the Yup’ik from the ethnographic record, based on the low numbers of women’s artifacts recovered. There was a burnt side room, with a large number of arrowheads present, which is possibly a result of conflict. More work is planned.
Chistyann Darwent followed with a report on the 2010 work at Cape Espenberg, a beach ridge complex which is located near Kotzebue in the Bering Land Bridge National Preserve. This project has been doing survey there for a couple of years and has surveyed and mapped extensively, especially the more recent periods. They have actually been able to excavate several houses (one on each of the 3 Thule-age ridges) to a considerable extent. One thing they discovered was that the surface mapping did not necessarily give a good picture of what was under the ground in terms of houses, side rooms and so forth. One of the houses seems to have burned, although why is not yet clear. They excavated an outdoor ceramic manufacturing area (inadvertently–it looked like part of the house from the surface). The houses on the oldest and middle Thule ridges had Thule 2 harpoon heads associated with them, suggesting that they were fairly early. The also found a copper eyed needle, slat armor. The tunnel floor was lined with baleen. The youngest house was of a type that was familiar to the project’s elder consultant, who had been in the US Army during the Korean War, since he’d grown up in a similar house. It had lots of evidence for fishing. The dates were a bit later than prior testing had led them to expect, the oldest around 1260-1400BP, the middle 1450-1650BP.
Justin Tackney gave a paper on mDNA (mitochondrial DNA) from Nuvuk, as well as presenting the new direct dates that Joan Coltrane has for the human remains. The results show a number of haplogroups hypothesized to be founders to modern Inuit populations all in one area, which is new. In general, this supports a Thule expansion from North Alaska.
I got the slot before lunch, and gave a paper looking at the material culture of modern Iñupiat whaling. I am using this as a way to approach what sort of evidence might be expected in archaeological sites of whalers, and where that evidence might be found. Essentially, the modern case has a number of artifacts that are needed for whaling and nothing else, most of which have pre-contact equivalents. The interesting thing is that they are generally not stored in the house, which implies that excavations focused on houses may not be able to address presence/absence whaling too well.
Despite the fact that I am still in New York on vacation (except for things like on-line payroll and P-card reviewing and approving, which can’t wait), I’m taking a bit a of a break from reading mysteries and eating Christmas goodies to work on several things I have in progress. I’m not going to be able to finish any of them, since I don’t have any books here for checking references, and most of the images I want to use are in the Aperture vault on my computer back in Barrow. However, I can do outlines, and get a fair bit of the text drafted before I get home, at least for some of them.
In order they are: 1) PowerPoint & accompanying paper on Iñupiat and Cold War Science for a conference in Munich, 2) encyclopedia article on Western Thule 1300-1750AD in North & Northwest Alaska (in 7000 words maximum!), 3)PowerPoint on Alaskan archaeological sites and threats to them from climate change as it has been observed to be occurring for a conference in Tromsø, Norway, 4) article I’m working on with Claire Alix and Owen Mason on Ipiutak at Nuvuk, 5) encyclopedia article on Barrow sites (Nuvuk, Birnirk and Utqiagvik), 6) paper on ethnographic data on storage of whaling gear, and 7) a paper on whaling gear recovered from archaeological sites which are known to have had whaling taking place.
These all have places they are to go, and times they need to be there. Nothing concentrates the mind like deadlines, except perhaps the threat of execution…
Out of Ice and Time 