Scientists say they have resolved one of the biggest arguments in the climate change debate. In a report published in “Science” magazine today, they present a new, comprehensive analysis of how much the giant ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica have been melting and how much that adds to the rise of the world’s oceans.
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It’s very Alaskan to have a freezer full of wild food. Tell us how you use that food on the next “Talk ofAlaska.” Food from the wild and preparing food that feeds the spirit as well as the body is the subject on the next Talk of Alaska.
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LIVE Broadcast: Tuesday, December 4, 2012 at 10:00 a.m. on APRN stations statewide.
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Confessed serial killer Israel Keyes is dead of an apparent suicide in his Alaska prison cell. Federal prosecutors announced Keyes’ death at a news conference on Sunday. They said Keyes confessed to abducting Samantha Koenig from an espresso cart last February in Anchorage, and killing her, also to abducting and killing Bill and Lorraine Currier of Essex, Vermont. They say there may have been other killings as well.
Two people who died Friday in a collision on the Parks Highway have been identified. Shawn Dugan, 25, of Fort Wainwright, and Sandy Graetzsch, 33, of Fairbanks were killed when their vehicle slid across the center line and hit a SUV with three aboard, who were treated for non life-threatening injuries.
They are identified as Rhonda Coghill of Nenana and her daughter and 5-year-old granddaughter.
Alaska’s biggest landlord is the federal government, and for better or worse, some of its living heritage is about to disappear. Due to a quirk in federal law, some senior federal personnel in Alaska plan to retire by the end of the year. Their regrets, their memories and their advice to fellow Alaskans will be the subject of the next Talk of Alaska.
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LIVE Broadcast: Tuesday, December 11, 2012 at 10:00 a.m. on APRN stations statewide.
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You can add the name of NOAA Administrator Jane Lubchenko to the list of top Obama administration officials not sticking around for the president’s second term. The Commerce Undersecretary for Oceans and Atmosphere told her staff Wednesday that she will be leaving her job early next year.
“I announced to the NOAA family today that I’ll be leaving at the end of February,” she said. “So I’m really proud of all we’ve been able to accomplish and can leave knowing things are in good hands, cause there’s a lot more to be done.”
Lubchenko helped lead the administration’s response to the Deepwater Horizon spill in the Gulf of Mexico and is responsible for fishery policies and marine mammal management, as well as the National Weather Service.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) support for expanding quota share programs for allocating fisheries has been controversial in Alaska. She has been a professor of marine ecology at Oregon State University since 1977 and a longtime advocate for science and science communication to the public.
She told APRN today that she will continue those efforts.
“So I envision myself continuing to play a role in being a champion for science and for use of science especially in making environmental decisions,” she said.
“The scientific information helps us do a better job managing fisheries so they can be sustainable, in protecting healthy ocean and ocean ecosystems, because we depend on them for so much. And if we want to be good stewards then the scientific information can help us understand how to do that.”
Lubchenko is a former President of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and has been part of President Obama’s science team.
The Deepwater Horizon blowout of 2010 marked the first time that chemical dispersants were injected into an oil spill underwater. Now a report from government scientists finds remarkably few ill effects from these chemicals. That has heightened concerns of several Native groups, and others who have been pushing for tighter regulation of dispersants.
Lead author of the report, Doctor Jane Lubchenko, the head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, was a key advisor to Environmental Protection Agency head Lisa Jackson when she made the decision, shortly after the blowout, to allow them to use dispersants underwater.
“It was our judgment that use of dispersants would help the oil be naturally biodegraded more naturally, and that certainly seems to have been the case” Lubchenko said.
Nearly two million gallons of dispersants, mostly Corexit, were used on the spill, close to half of it underwater while the oil and gas was gushing out of the wellhead and the broken pipe a mile deep in the waters of the Gulf of Mexico.
The result was a sort of undersea fog of droplets of oil mixed with Corexit. Just months later, scientists couldn’t find the fog, and there is some evidence that oil eating micro-organisms ate it. Depending on which scientist you talk to, it’s either gone or it made its way to the bottom and is still percolating through the food chain. The report says the location of the fog has yet to be determined.
But what if a spill happened in cold arctic waters? Would dispersants do the same thing? That’s a question everybody wants the answer to. The industry and government laboratories have just begun research to try to get answers. Cheryl Rosa is deputy director of the Arctic Research Commission, which recently issued a set of recommendations for what needs to be done to improve arctic oil spill response capability:
The amount of dispersant that was applied in Deepwater Horizon was unprecedented,” Rosa said. “It was basically the world’s supply, from what I understand. And we need to be extremely well informed with respect to the Arctic about how that’s going to work. If they get applied, what the toxicity issues are, what the community concerns should be and hopefully this new research will start to get at some of those some of those questions.”
Jane Lubchenko and the co-authors of the Deepwater Horizon science report talk about a public perception problem about the safety of seafood from the Gulf of Mexico. The government had a series of fisheries closures near the spill site and within a year re-opened all the fisheries. Lubchenko says the evidence for contamination just never showed up.:
“We did learn a lot about that and discovered that in fact the fishes in particular, we were not able to find levels of dispersants in them after they had been swimming around in the ocean for awhile.”
She was quick to add that shellfish would not metabolize the chemicals as fast as finfish. She went on to say that any adverse effects that might have been found would not have been included in her report — because such damages are still the subject of litigation.
“Our papers don’t talk about consequences of dispersants because we don’t know that yet and the information that may be in hand, may be part of the legal proceedings,” Lubchenko said.
There is evidence on the record that oil mixed with dispersants is more toxic than oil on its own, particularly to larvae of marine life. And along the northern shores of Alaska, with their biologically rich lagoons, Cheryl Rosa says the questions about what such mixes could do are critically in need of answers.
“Basically dispersants get applied, drive oil into the water column where it is broken down to parts and pieces,” Rosa said. “They’re trying to figure out what the consequences of wide scale use of dispersants are. And that’s a work in progress as far as I can tell. And as far as the arctic goes, that question is still very open. It’s something in need of research.”
In August, Earthjustice and other environmental organizations sued EPA to force tighter regulation of dispersants. Then last month, a number of scientists and doctors joined several Alaska Native organizations in petitioning the EPA to ban Corexit or any other dispersant of undisclosed composition.
Many Alaskans make a point of listening to the radio on the last Tuesday before Christmas for the unique experience of hearing holiday greetings from friends and relatives across the state on “Talk of Alaska.” It’s your chance to reach out to people near and far with your good wishes for the holiday and the new year. It’s a special two-hour Holiday Greetings edition of Talk of Alaska.
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LIVE Broadcast: Tuesday, December 18, 2012 at 10:00 a.m. on APRN stations statewide.
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A legislative aide resigned today because of ethics violations involving an anti-Islam organization. The Legislative Ethics Committee ruled that Karen Sawyer, an aide to Representative Shelly Hughes of Palmer, had failed to disclose that she was a board member of the organization “Stop Islamization of America,” and that she allowed the director of that organization to use state facilities when she was a staffer for the late Carl Gatto, who died while in office and was replaced by Hughes.
The committee recommended that Sawyer not be employed by the Legislature in the future. Representative Hughes had a talk with Sawyer this morning, at which she accepted her recommendation. In a press release, Hughes called the violations a “lapse in judgement.”
Gatto introduced House Bill 88, which, had it passed, would have banned Islamic Sharia Law in Alaska.
Today Governor Sean Parnell announced a $12.8 billion-dollar budget for 2014, saying it’s more than a billion dollars leaner than this year’s budget and leaves a half-billion-dollar surplus. But he’s willing to negotiate with lawmakers on increasing it, if they will agree to a spending limit.
Work has begun on the gas field at Point Thomson on the North Slope. The Exxon-Mobil Corporation is working to connect the field to an existing pipeline, twenty-two miles away.
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The Food and Drug Administration has approved genetically modified salmon, deciding the fish would not pose an environmental threat. This triggered outrage from Alaska’s congressional delegation.
The draft environmental assessment means no environmental impact statement. Representative Don Young and Senator Mark Begich say they will turn their attention to labeling requirements for the fish.
The opposition to genetically engineered salmon from health and consumer groups, as well as environmental and fishing interests.
A project is underway to replace the power line across Turnagain Pass on the Kenai Peninsula. Skiers and snowmachiners between Turnagain Arm and the Johnson Pass campground are advised to be on the lookout for stockpiles of materials placed there by the Chugach Electric Association, which may be covered with snow as the winter wears on.
At its heart it was yet another episode of extreme weather. In this case it happened in the winter of 2010 and 2011. It was extreme snowfall, avalanches and icing, and power lines were wiped out. It took weeks to restore them.
The Chugach Electric Association spent at least a couple of million dollars to get the intertie between Anchorage and the Kenai Peninsula working again. Spokesman Phil Steyer says the line, built in 1962, has seen better days, and is very much in need of replacement:
A $15-million appropriation from the Legislature will pay for replacing the highest priority section of the line, through the mountains above Turnagain Arm along the Seward Highway, where the damage caused by the storm can easily be seen in all the trees that simply broke, at the upper parts of their trunks, due to heavy snow and ice load.
The new power line will be capable of doubling the capacity of the intertie, and will be elevated higher above the ground, so it can more easily shed ice:
In all, 21 spans of the transmission line sagged to the ground during that storm. The fifteen miles being replaced this winter will add to the amount of the 90-mile line that was replaced after the 2011 avalanches.
Not much information available yet from Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson, where the Army says a soldier was found dead in the barracks on Tuesday morning of an apparent gunshot wound. The name has not yet been released. The Army says an investigation is being done.
The Army has identified the man found dead of a gunshot wound at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson Tuesday morning as Private Grant Wise, 25, of Fairport, New York. Wise was assigned to Alaska duty with the 4-25th in September, after serving at Fort Bragg. The Army says he was found dead in another soldier’s barracks room and investigation continues.
A crew member fell overboard from a cargo vessel in the Gulf of Alaska Tuesday night and was not found. The “Aqua Splendor” was on its way to Asia from Washington state and was about 300 miles south of Kodiak when the crew member fell. They threw flotation gear to him and put out a distress call. The Coast Guard sent out a C-130 but it was forced by the weather to turn back. A second vessel also searched, but found no sign of the man.
Kikkan Randall once again dominated an event in the Tour de Ski yesterday, winning all heats of the freestyle sprint event. Her rival, Justina Kowalchik of Poland, did not make the final heat. Randall ended up 8.7 seconds ahead of her closest competitor.
The grounding of the drilling rig “Kulluk” has been pounced on by environmental groups who say we are not yet prepared to deal with the risks of drilling in Arctic Ocean waters. Are they right? We’ll hear what Alaskans have to say about drilling in their own waters on the next Talk of Alaska.
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LIVE Broadcast: Tuesday, January 8, 2013 at 10:00 a.m. on APRN stations statewide.
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Photo courtesy of the U.S. Coast Guard.
There will be two federal investigations of what went wrong with the Kulluk, the 266-foot Shell drilling rig that went adrift in the Gulf of Alaska and ended up on the rocks of the outer coast of Kodiak Island.
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An Anchorage man died Tuesday after he was struck by a car pulling out of a parking lot on a midtown street. James Castro, 64, initially appeared uninjured but later died in the hospital. Police have not yet released the identity of the 68-year-old woman who drove the SUV that hit him.
