…as “anadromous Snowy Owls,” borrowing an adjective from Pacific salmon biology

Regrettably, I was no longer in a position to study owls breeding at Barrow. Regrettably also, long-lasting satellite-interrogable transmitters were still too massive to use on these owls to test my hunch in 1994.

That hunch, borrowing lessons from experiences with sandpipers 20 years earlier, was that Snowy Owls are socially opportunistic, as are species like Baird’s Sandpipers and Pectoral Sandpipers. Furthermore their searches for resources sufficient to support breeding each summer requires individual owls or small flocks to cross (frozen) oceans. On top of that, I imagined that sea-going owls must take a while to get from one continent to another, and it would be surprising if they did not need to feed while in transit. A logical choice of prey would be seabirds, and seaducks, such as eiders.

Another decade after my 3-part hunch was formed, a series of studies in eastern Canada documented Snowy Owls’ predation from sea ice in Hudsons Bay on overwintering eider ducks. Not intercontinental oceangoing, but a start.

I had started joking with biologist colleagues, that we should soon be able to refer to Snowy Owls, and perhaps other large-bodied owl species as “anadromous” in the same sense as “anadromous” salmon that go to sea for resources for part of their life cycle.

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http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=2&cad=rja&ved=0CDkQ6QUoADAB&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.birdlife.no%2Fprosjekter%2F&ei=axl3UY-PBcTC2QWWqoDQDQ&usg=AFQjCNHOP7BrcuirNJfgePlKxOpwtVUydg&bvm=bv.45580626,d.b2I

About a decade after my questioning the biologist-pilots, satellite interrogableinstruments became small enough, so that Scandinavian- and Arctic Russian-breeding Snowy Owls were documented to travel long distances east and west before breeding seasons, as expected of birds who needed to prospect for peak microtine populations.

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A second group in Canada hung transmitters on owls in the high Arctic, and followed their post-breeding movements south to sub-Arctic Labrador and eastern Hudson’s Bay.

The final vindication of my hunch were two female Snowy Owls that yo-yo-ed back and forth between eastern Siberia, Alaska, and the Canadian high Arctic (Banks Island) a few years after that. We had our “anadromous,” opportunistic, monotypic Snowy Owls at last!

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And frosting on my insight, someone named Phil Jeffrey confirmed photographically on the web my prediction that a wandering, prospecting female Snowy Owl could—should—prey on seabirds to fuel her intercontinental prospecting excursions.

Sea-going, “anadromous,” socially opportunistic, seaduck-predatory,…and monotypic…Snowy Owls, indeed.

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July 1958After

YakutatEarthquake

A final example of insight grew during my years of teaching for UAF-OLLI.

For several semesters, I taught a fun and evolving course, the original full title of which was:“Alaska’s 1964 (Good Friday) Earthquake: An isolated catastrophe fading from memory, or a “game-changer” in debates over plate tectonics?”

There was plenty of material to provide a rich palette of stories, conjectures, perspectives, and new insights. And that bank of material continued to grow, even 45 or so years after the 1964 earthquake itself. A good place to start understanding this mountain of fun is Lituya Bay, between Yakutat and Glacier Bay, Alaska.

This photo is taken from T. Neal Davis’s book, Head, Tail, Guts, and shows Lituya a few days after the July 1958 Yakutat Earthquake. The almost unbelievable story of Lituya was studied by Don Miller and his assistant, George Plafker in 1952-53 for the Alaska Branch of the USGS regional office in Menlo Park California. The Alaska Branch was founded primarily to prospect for valuable minerals in the Territory of Alaska. That priority remained intact through World War II and beyond. File this away for remembering in a few minutes: Don and George found evidence that huge waves had periodically swept trees away many metres above sea level on several occasions, starting in the mid- and late 19th century, and as recently as 1936. At the time of the 1958 earthquake, 3 fishing boats were anchored in Lituya (triangles).

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Here was a USCGS navigational chart. Someone has drawn in black ink the “trimlines” that Henrickson, Tocher, Don J. Miller, and Neil Davis all observed and photographed right after the 1958 Yakutat Earthquake. Again, the 3 triangles denote approximate locations of the 3 fishing boats. I have overlain in yellow the progress seaward of a huge splash wave generated by a landslide that crashed down on the tidewater glacier on the north arm of Lituya (see the star). The red inset arrow denotes both the direction that the splash wave travelled and the approximate course taken by the airplane from which the inset photo was taken a day or two after the 1958 Yakutat earthquake. That inset photo shows the spit and the anchorage inside the spit filled with pealed logs stripped from the shores up to the new (1958) trimline. That photo also shows a long winding driftline of logs going seaward outside the spit.

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Henrickson? 1998

Henrickson’s collection included this slide, taken in 1998, which was reproduced incorrectly on his posthumous website, but which I reprinted correctly (as indicated by the writing in the lower right). You can see clearly the 40-year old trimline along the north shore, and just about see the narrow space on Cenotaph Island carved by the wave overwashing its low point.

Don Miller’s field studies from 1952-53 were suddenly made valuable by the loss of 2 fishing boats and 2 fishermen’s lives in 1958. Despite USGS Alaska Branch’s lack of interest in earthquakes and harbor waves, Miller and Plafker’s work was published in 1960. Then, when Don Miller died in an accident in 1961, USGS invited Miller’s former assistant, George Plafker, to come back from South America to take his former boss’s position doing fieldwork for the Alaska Branch. George came back, and thus was available to USGS when the 1964 Great Alaska Good Friday Earthquake struck.

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Young George, shown here, was one of 3 USGS staff who conducted a quick survey in March-April of 1964, of earthquake damage and then to plan for years of intensive USGS research in a quest to identify causes of the 1964 Alaska Quake. That summer of 1964, USGS supported its field operatives and investigators from many other agencies and universities in Alaska, using the Don J. Miller, a dedicated USGS support vessel.

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Plafker himself had a master’s but not a doctoral degree in geology, in 1964. He became fascinated by anomalies in the way the seaward edge of the North American continental Plate had been deformed by the 27th March Great Quake, and the fact that there were few if any surface expressions of faulting usually associated with major earthquakes. This view of the seaward end of Montague Island in Prince William Sound shows a major zone of uplift identified by formerly subtidal shells of invertebrates, now bleached white, after the Alaska Quake.

George Plafker wrestled with this anomaly for many months before finally gaining an insight that this area was the leading edge of contact between the continental (North American) plate, and the subducting Pacific Plate that lurched underneath this area in March 1964. A few years later, George received his doctoral degree for studies of the parallels between the Chile Earthquake of 1960 and this North American Great Earthquake. The last major reluctance by North American geologists to the theory of plate tectonics was overcome by George Plafker’s work. And that’s the connection to the 1958 drama at Lituya Bay.

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Henry Bauer’s analysis (1992) is candid about the difficulties of the passage of time for both scientists and non-scientists. On the one hand, he jokes that the value of an immortality potion would take forever to verify in one cartoon that he reproduces;On the other hand, he appreciates two researchers being depressed at the prospect that “in a few years” everything that they believe will be disproven, replaced by new beliefs or paradigms.

Bauer is helpful in distinguishing between stable beliefs (“textbook science”) and still-debatable and yet-forming beliefs or paradigms (“frontier science”). The former is the body of accepted relationships that are the grist for undergraduate education; the latter is where research remains engaged in struggles to disprove (or at least clarify) suggested cause-effect relationships and new insights. This is the frontier at which graduate degree candidates in scientific fields are expected to contribute new insights and observations supporting them.

Examples:Plate tectonics are nearly universally accepted as the body of processes by which the outermost crust of our planet slowly renews itself. Natural selection as a mechanism that accounts for evolution of organic life is pretty universally accepted in the western world (except the U.S.?). Anthropogenic release of greenhouse gases is widely, but not universally, accepted as prime causes of global climate change since the beginning of the industrial revolution.

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4.6 × 10 9 years (4.6 Billion y)^ ^

50 y(=1/ 100 millionth of 4.6 by)

Now, finally, to address the University’s second century. First, as a preamble, some perspectives on the passage of time. Martin Rees (2010) makes some chilling observations in advance of predicting what will happen by the time of the Royal Society’s upcoming 400th anniversary in 2060. The last 50 years have seen a bewildering acceleration in information technology at the fingertips of scientists and other scholars, and extending to people outside those pursuits. In 1960 at the beginning of the NASA Apollo series of space adventures, the amount of computing power in the command module had become impressive. By 2010, that amount of computing power had been extended to a smartphone and even to a washing machine!

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¦ Big Bang 13.8 Bya Death of our Sun = Big Bang + 19.8 By ¦

TodaySolar System Birth

Alien Observer’sNotes on Earth’s

acceleratingChanges in the last

century:

Vegetation Change;Radio Waves;Satellites andSpace Probes;

…and…

…Visible LightEmissions !

This exponential rate of increase in technological prowess is breathtaking, when you consider that 50 years represents one 100 millionth of the age of our solar system (4.6 by)

Let’s suppose that intelligent aliens are watching our planet closely enough to have noticed this exponential pattern over the last 100 years (two 100 millionths of the age of our solar system, and a much smaller fraction of the age of the universe since the big bang). Those alien observers would have to have been impressed by the changes in Earth’s vegetation, the proliferation of radio frequency emissions (including broadcast and cell phone traffic) the flurry of space probes, now beginning to stretch out beyond our solar system, and…

Our growing emissivity in the visible (to us, at least) spectrum.

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100-Years Ago 50 Years Ago Now 50 Years Out 100 Years Out

UA UAF/ Higher U.S.?UAA Ed?? Alaska?

WWI WWII Viet Nam 9/11 Global Climate? Biosphere?Econ. Extinctions?

Univac Apollo PCs Smartphones AI ?

IPY 2 I[G]Y 3 IBP IPY 4 IPY 5? IPY 6?

“Frontier Science” degreesshould henceforth require:

An S.T.E.M. discipline,combined with at least 1 of

the following practica:

GeographyCivics

DemographyJournalism

EthicsHistory

Communications

Dave’s Outlook/Recommendations/

Cautions:

"The Significance of the Frontier in American History"

Fredrick JacksonTurner 1861-1932

From my non-alien perspective, the last 100 and the next 100 years present a formidable challenge, too. It is important, furthermore for us to put an Alaska spin on this outlook: Back to the idea of a frontier: Any historians here will recall that Fredrick Jackson Turner in 1893 reflected on what he called the closure of the American Frontier.

“…The most significant thing about the American frontier is that it lies at the hither edge of free land. In the census reports it is treated as the margin of that settlement

which has a density of two or more to the square mile.” Fredrick Jackson Turner (1893). [The 2.0/mi2 rule]

Alaska’s population density in 2013 (120 years later) was about 1.3/mi2

That ranks Alaska 50th of 50 states, the next least populous being Wyoming at 6 persons per square mile. The greatest population density in the U.S. was that of the District of Columbia, at 11,000 + per square mile. Anchorage’s Borough had a population density of 156 + persons per square mile, and is home to nearly half the population of Alaska. We, as citizens of a persistent frontier, and our University as anchor to a very thin line of citizens with a stake in frontier science of the last frontier, have a heavy, heady assignment just to view and comment on the next 50 years.

Items in the box here are just a beginning of many essential discussions that we should be engaged in constantly for the foreseeable future.

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������ ���� �: George C. West, Laurence N. Irving, Frank A. Pitelka, Stephen F. MacLean, Jr., Robert B. Weeden, Judith S. Weeden, Howard Feder,

John J. Kelley, Gunter Weller, Dana Thomas, Kenneth Toovak, Sr., Karim-Aly S. Kassam, Carl S. Benson, A.R. Fiorillo, Karen McCullough,

Martti Soikkeli, Ted Fathauer, George Divoky, Craig George, Paul Reichhardt, Larry Hinzman, Hajo Eicken, Ron Inouye, John J. Burns, Paul B. Whitney,

Don Borchert, Les Viereck, Teri Viereck, Fred Dean, Barb Lando, Sarah Garland,Mark A. Johnson, Ernst Mayr, E. O. Wilson, Michael C. T. Smith, Carol C. Norton, Jerry Brown, Maxwell Britton, Pete Sovalik, Roland Gangloff, Karen N. Brewster,

Jim Hemming, Jim Kowalsky, Denise Wartes, Helga Wilm, Paul J. McCarthy, Edwin S. Clarke, R. Sage Murphy, Benny J. Gallaway, William H. Drury, Karen N. Brewster, Stanley E. Senner, William D. Arvey, Victoriya Forsythe,

Jeffrey Simonson, Donald M. Schell, Rod Herrick, Amy Lauren Lovecraft, John Davies, Bernard Zak, David M. Hopkins, Peter Barnes, Dan O’Neill, Bill Schneider,

Raymond A. Paynter, Linda Schandelmeier, Ron Mancil, Erk Reimnitz, David R. Klein, Peter Lent, Thomas F. Albert, Geoff Carroll, A. Sathy Naidu, Dan O’Neill,

Patrick McManus, Douglas B. Sands, Wilbur Crockett, John Bryant, T. Neil Davis,Al Belon, Michelle Bartlett, Bill Bryson, Bill Woodward, Richard Chandler, Neil deGrasse Tyson,

Dean Rand, David Stone, Bill Stringer, Neal Brown, Ginny Wood, Celia Hunter,Uriel Safriel, Rod Combellick, R. Dale Guthrie, Ray Hadley, Gordon Haas, Keen Richards,

Jennifer Schmidt, Skip Ambrose, , …

RAHI students, Ilisagvik students, Upward Bound students, Alaska Summer Research Academy students, OLLI Members, OLLI Board of Directors,AINA Theme School Seminar students, Museum Studies students, ….

Thank you for putting up with my ruminations. As this image suggests, I have many, many people to thank for making my life interesting and for contributing way more than I expected to the few insights I’ve talked about tonight, and a few more.

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