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.
Point Barrow seen from the end of the road.
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.
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.
Ice halo over Barrow, showing sun with 22º halo, parhelic circle running through the sundog, and the lower tangent arc on the horizon.Ice halo, showing sun with 22º halo, a parhelic circle through the parhelion (sundog), and an upper tangent arc.
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 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.
View out the front window during Wednesday's blizzard. Notice the snow streaks and the frost flowers.
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.
Drift at the door at lunchtime on Thursday.
The snow was sculpted in very interesting ways, which had gotten more elaborate while the car was out of the way.
Drift at the front of my house, lunchtime on Thursday. The grill is almost completely exposed.
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.
Snow in the arctic entryway.
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.
View out the front door, showing snowed-in car, and ivu (ice push) on the beach in the background.
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!).
The Town of Ballston, where my mother lives, has been fairly lucky as far as snow this winter. They’ve gotten some, but haven’t really been hammered. As a result, it was a white Christmas, but only just, and the snow was getting a bit worn-looking. The storm that has been creating havoc in the eastern US for several days was expected to miss entirely, but by Christmas it was tracking close to the coast, and so we did get some after Christmas snow. It was a pretty decent nor’easter along the coast, but we just got outer snow bands, for a total of about 5-6″ overnight. The trees were all snow-covered, and the bare patches and dirty spots disappeared, making everything clean & bright and new when I went out to get the paper (Paper delivery! Something we don’t have in Barrow. We can’t even get paper sent to the stores, apparently. And the newspapers wonder why readership is declining…). It’s hard not to feel optimistic when one goes out after a snow storm is over. The winds weren’t too bad here, although we did get enough gusts to take much of the snow off the evergreens over the course of the day.
The other thing was that the snow covered many of the plants, so the seed eating birds were looking for something else, and found the seed bell we’d gotten them for Christmas. We had a pair of cardinals, juncos, a blue jay, and tufted titmice and chickadees. Only the latter two stuck around until I got my camera out.
Action at the seed bell.Tufted titmouse.Chickadee
As far as I could see, there were no deformed bills in the bunch, unlike the situation in Alaska, where they are becoming alarmingly frequent.
I’m in Bryn Mawr, PA for the 18th Arctic Conference. The trip went well, with the biggest problem the 30+ minute taxi from the runway to the terminal here in Philadelphia. I’m staying in Wyndham, the Bryn Mawr College Alumnae House, replete with antiques, oriental rugs, etc. Rick Davis pretty much had everything in hand, so I had some free time to check out the 125th Anniversary exhibit in the Rare Book Room at Canaday Library, which was really pretty neat. A First Folio (Shakespeare), a Nuremberg Chronicle, a Maria Martinez black-on-black pot, Ansel Adams prints, Northwest Coast basketry, Mary Cassatt, Japanese woodblock prints, some lovely Greek pottery (including a plate by the Bryn Mawr Painter!) all in the same small room.
Had a nice dinner with Rick and Rick Knecht, and now off to bed to try & catch up on sleep so I can get up at what my body thinks is 3:45 AM.
We’ll be on around 1:30 AKDT today. No Heather, since she fell on the ice we’ve got covering everything here (they even canceled the evening plane due to an icy runway) and hurt her ankle, so she’s laid up.
That’s the forecast, and tomorrow more of the same. The wind is supposed to drop a bit, although that was supposed to happen today too. Not so much.
Unfortunately for me, and the two guys who are going to be helping me. I have to stake out the locations for the heating elements for the tundra warming prototype experiment. We are going to have to lug the total station, tripod, computer, batteries, and a whole action packer full of stakes out the boardwalk to the area on the BEO where this thing is supposed to be located. No 4-wheelers are allowed, so we’ll have to use a wheelbarrow to drag it out there. I figure we can leave the stakes & such overnight if we don’t finish, but everything else will have to come back in.
The array is hexagonal, so it’s more complex than just laying out a grid. Actually, it’s sort of two offset grids, except that the boxes are rectangular, not square, so there are a lot of weird angles. In some cases, I’m just going to have to move the transit, rather than accumulate error, since the total station I’m using is only accurate to 5 sec of arc. Anyway, it will make the math simpler, and should probably be faster. I hope.
I woke up and turned on the radio this morning in time to hear the morning fellow recommend paying attention to the weather. Since most folks here do that anyway, it was obvious that something a bit unusual was coming.
…COASTAL FLOOD WATCH REMAINS IN EFFECT FROM 2 AM AKDT SATURDAY THROUGH LATE SATURDAY NIGHT…
A COASTAL FLOOD WATCH REMAINS IN EFFECT FROM 2 AM AKDT SATURDAY THROUGH LATE SATURDAY NIGHT. LOW PRESSURE 400 MILES NORTH OF BARROW EARLY THIS AFTERNOON WILL STRENGTHEN TONIGHT AS THE LOW MOVES SOUTH. BY SATURDAY MORNING THE LOW IS EXPECTED TO BE ABOUT 250 MILES NORTH OF BARROW. STRONG NORTHWEST WINDS WILL DEVELOP ALONG THE BACKSIDE OF THE LOW. WIND SPEEDS OF AROUND 25 KNOTS ARE EXPECTED IN BARROW LATE TONIGHT THROUGH SATURDAY NIGHT WITH WINDS TO 35 KNOTS OFFSHORE.
THE SEA ICE IS NOW NEAR SEASONAL MINIMUMS AND THERE IS OPEN WATER SEVERAL HUNDRED MILES TO THE NORTHWEST OF BARROW. THIS WILL CAUSE SEAS NEAR SHORE TO BUILD TO 9 TO 13 FEET ON SATURDAY. THE SEAS ARE EXPECTED TO BREAK ALONG OR NEAR SHORE. IN ADDITION TO THE HIGH SEAS A STORM SURGE OF UP TO 2 FEET IS POSSIBLE AROUND THE TIMES OF HIGH TIDE SATURDAY AND SATURDAY NIGHT. SIGNIFICANT BEACH EROSION IS EXPECTED WITH MINOR COASTAL FLOODING POSSIBLE AROUND THE TIMES OF HIGH TIDE. THE AREA AROUND STEVENSON STREET NEAR THE BOAT LAUNCH BY THE CITY PLAYGROUND IS PARTICULARLY VULNERABLE TO FLOODING. OTHER LOW SPOTS ON DOWN THE BEACH WILL ALSO HAVE THE POTENTIAL FOR MINOR FLOODING.
ADDITIONALLY…SIGNIFICANT EROSION TO THE BLUFFS ARE LIKELY AS WELL.
PRECAUTIONARY/PREPAREDNESS ACTIONS
… A COASTAL FLOOD WATCH MEANS THAT CONDITIONS FAVORABLE FOR FLOODING ARE EXPECTED TO DEVELOP. COASTAL RESIDENTS SHOULD BE ALERT FOR LATER STATEMENTS OR WARNINGS…AND TAKE ACTION TO PROTECT PROPERTY. NOW IS THE TIME TO MAKE PREPARATIONS AND MOVE ALL PROPERTY WELL AWAY FROM THE BEACH.
Not what I needed to hear… Turns out it’s the first big fall storm. With the ice so far out, that means lots of room for the wind to put energy into the water, which means big waves and a storm surge. That means beach erosion for sure, and maybe coastal flooding. Our weather forecasts here are a bit less accurate than those most other places, because there are no observing stations where the weather is coming from. It’s sort of like trying to predict weather in Pennsylvania using data from nothing but a weather station in Chicago.
I don’t like fall storms and coastal erosion. Aside from the dangers associated with flooding (the house I live in floated in 1963, and if it does it again we might wind up in a sewage lagoon), erosion is the most immediate threat to coastal archaeological sites. I spend my summers trying to organize things so that we got well ahead of erosion at Nuvuk and now are trying to stay that way.
2004 fall storm erodes NuvukNuvuk bluff slumps from effects of surf
The thing is, Nuvuk, where “the houses are all gone under the sea” to borrow T.S. Elliot’s phrase, is just one of many important sites. Utqiagvik, Nunagiak, Ipiutak, Tikigak (Point Hope), and so on down the coast. Most of the sites on the Beaufort coast from Point Barrow east to the Mackenzie River Delta in Canada have already washed away and out of the archaeological record.
Out of Ice and Time 