A polar bear in Alaska’s North Slope. Photograph: Sylvain Cordier/Gamma-Rapho through Getty Photographs
Six environmental teams filed a lawsuit Tuesday searching for to cease the ConocoPhillips’ Willow oil mission in Alaska from going forward after it was authorized by the Biden administration.
Driving the information: The coalition alleges that the administration authorized the mission regardless of realizing the hurt posed to Arctic communities, wildlife and local weather, and argues that it’ll spew poisonous emissions and greenhouse fuel air pollution, undermining President Biden’s local weather guarantees.
Context: The mission is estimated to provide about 576 million barrels of oil over 30 years and will probably be positioned on a portion of Alaska’s North Slope — one of many final unspoiled wilderness areas within the nation.
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Particulars: The teams accused authorities businesses of failing to contemplate the affect on land utilized by Alaska Natives and on endangered species reminiscent of polar bears.
“Willow would outcome within the development and operation of in depth oil and fuel and different infrastructure in delicate arctic habitats and can considerably affect the area’s wildlife, air, water, lands, and folks,” the lawsuit states.
The teams allege that the Bureau of Land Administration violated the Nationwide Environmental Coverage Act by failing to contemplate affordable options that may reduce the impacts.
What they’re saying: “No single oil and fuel mission has extra potential to set again the Biden administration’s local weather and public lands safety targets than Willow — the biggest new oil and fuel mission proposed on federal lands,” per a press release from Trustees for Alaska, which represents the environmental teams.
In the meantime, a Biden administration official mentioned Monday that Biden has totally closed off the U.S. Arctic Ocean to new oil and fuel leasing and that he is “delivering on probably the most aggressive local weather agenda in U.S. historical past.”
“Let’s be clear: this mission, which the Inside Division has considerably contracted underneath appreciable authorized constraints, gained’t cease us from attaining the formidable clear power targets President Biden has set,” the official mentioned in an emailed assertion.
For the file: The go well with, filed in U.S. District Courtroom, was introduced on by the Sovereign Iñupiat for a Residing Arctic, Alaska Wilderness League, Atmosphere America, Northern Alaska Environmental Middle, Sierra Membership and the Wilderness Society.
The ASAA 1A and 2A basketball divisions opened March Madness Alaska in Anchorage with tournaments spanning Wednesday to Saturday. It was madness indeed; not a single No. 1 seed won across the four tournaments. The ASAA 3A and 4A state championships begin Wednesday, March 20 and end on Saturday, March 23.
King Cove won the boys 1A title over top-seeded Kake in a battle of unbeatens, handing the defending state champions their first loss in over two years. Minto (26-3 overall), which lost to Kake in the semifinals, finished third at the state championships a week after winning the Golden Heart 1A Conference tournament at the UAF Patty Center.
The top seed in the boys 2A state championships also fell in the state title game when No. 3 Petersburg (18-10 overall) beat Hooper Bay (24-3) by a score of 41-33. Cordova (13-6) won the third-place game over Metlakatla. Defending 2A champion Ninilchik went 0-2 on the week.
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Fort Yukon (26-2) won the girls 1A state championship after winning the Golden Heart 1A Conference tournament in Fairbanks one week prior. The third-seeded Eagles narrowly defeated No. 2 seed Shaktoolik (who finished third) by three points in the semifinal before topping No. 4 Newhalen (31-2) by double digits in the state title game. Kylee Carroll and Nellie Ward each scored 19 points for Fort Yukon. Top-seeded Klawock finished fourth.
The girls 2A tournament was the only of the four divisions through the first week of March Madness Alaska that saw its top two seeds advance to the state championship game. It was a reprisal of last yearâs state title bout but with a role reversal. This year, Metlakatla (21-2) defeated top-seeded Tikigaq 51-42 behind 27 points from Lexi Cook. Nenana (20-6) finished 3rd.
When Cyrus Harris first saw a beaver during a camping trip in the tundra territory in the far northwest of Alaska in 1988, the discovery created a stir in his hometown of Kotzebue.
“That made big news then,” he said. He and his companions removed the beaver, which was near Cape Krusenstern just north of the Bering Strait, above the Arctic Circle and, until recently, far north of the Alaska tree line. When they heard about the beaver, Harris said, local Inupiat elders issued a warning that more would appear: “They’re coming, and that’s what’s going to be happening.”
The presence of beavers in the Arctic landscape around Kotzebue is no longer news. The beaver population, previously not an Arctic feature, has exploded in that region – and quickly transformed the landscape.
That transformation was summarized at a workshop in late February at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, where scientists and community residents shared research findings and observations.
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In a 100-square-kilometer area near Kotzebue — just under 40 square miles — the number of beaver dams jumped from two in 2002 to 98 in 2019, according to UAF research presented at the beginning of the three-day workshop. The workshop was part of a National Science Foundation-funded program called the Arctic Beaver Observation Network, or A-BON. On a wider area of the Baldwin Peninsula, the number went from 94 in 2010 to 409 in 2019. Across a wider area of Arctic Northwest Alaska, their presence went from nothing in the 1950s, as shown in aerial photos, to more than 11,300 beaver ponds identified through satellite imagery by 2019, according to the UAF scientists. The presence of beaver ponds in that region more than doubled between 2004 and 2017, the scientists found.
Satellite images that have tracked beaver expansion over time clearly show not just the number of dams but their drastic impacts, said Ken Tape, the UAF ecology professor who is leading the A-BON program. He pointed to one site as an example. “It basically changes from a little stream into a sprawling wetlands,” he said.
The proliferation of beavers is attributed to the northward spread of woody plants that they eat and use for their dams and lodges.
While climate change has enabled beavers to live farther north, the animals are exacerbating the effects of Arctic climate change. Through their dam and lodge engineering, they are inundating some areas with water, speeding up permafrost thaw. Elsewhere, they are drying out areas.
Effects of climate change were already underway on the tundra landscape, with permafrost warming and lakes expanding or draining and woody shrubs growing bigger and farther north, but those were relatively gradual – until the new arrivals began engineering the landscape, Tape said.
“All of a sudden, the beaver shows up. It’s like, wham, just night and day, completely different,” he said.
‘Tundra Be Dammed’
Tape, who got into beaver studies when he and UAF permafrost expert Ben Jones were tracking climate change effects on the tundra, has now become a leading authority on the animals’ northward expansion. A famous study that he led, published in 2018, described the phenomenon in Northwest Alaska and bore a catchy title: Tundra Be Dammed.
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Beavers can be as disruptive to the tundra ecosystem as wildfires are, Tape and his colleagues have concluded.
Beaver presence in Arctic Alaska largely stops at the Continental Divide in the Brooks Range, leaving the North Slope largely beaver-free – for now. There are some exceptions discovered recently: a beaver pond complex that was found on the Kongakut River, which flows through the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge near the Canadian border, and some chew marks and tracks left by beavers on the Killik River, which flows from a point in Gates of the Arctic National Park and Preserve into the bigger Colville River.
But that North Slope situation is expected to change, Tape said. Projections are that if the climate continues its current warming trend and shrubs continue spreading north, beavers will follow, moving down the northern side of the divide to establish themselves across the entire North Slope by century’s end, he said. “They’re poised to swim downstream,” he said.
For many residents, their animals’ new presence is a serious problem.
“We’re surrounded by beaver lodges,” said Ralph Ramoth of Selawik, an Inupiat village about 90 miles east of Kotzebue.
Beaver structures have blocked access to traditional areas for duck hunting and berry-picking, and they’ve created barriers on creeks where fish used to spawn, Ramoth said. They have affected water quality as well, he said.
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“When I was young, you used to be able to drink the water out of the river. Nowadays you don’t,” he said. Those who try, he said, get stomach distress. “People call it ‘beaver fever,’” he said, referring to the unpleasant intestinal infection caused by the parasite giardia.
Beaver sins
There is a long litany of observed or suspected beaver sins in their new Arctic territory that were discussed at the workshop.
Their dams can be insurmountable barriers to fish, particularly to the whitefish that are important subsistence foods but not particularly strong swimmers. That affects people who depend on those fish for their diets – and reverberates through the food web in ways that might seem surprising. Belugas in Arctic waters, for example, depend on whitefish populations that might be harmed by new beaver presence.
As articulated by Ramoth and by residents of Canada’s Northwest Territories who attended the workshop, beaver structures can impede travel, blocking boat routes long used in the summer and turning once-dependable winter ice-travel routes into danger zones.
Deteriorated water quality is a widespread concern; Harris noted that beaver complexes are plentiful just upstream of the reservoir that is the drinking-water source for Kotzebue.
There are potentially longer-term and wider-ranging effects as well.
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By speeding permafrost thaw, they are hastening the release of carbon into the atmosphere, scientists said. That is because permafrost holds organic material accumulated over thousands of years that, through freeze, is resistant to decomposition, said Michael Loranty, an associate professor of geography at Colgate University in New York.
“But when you start thawing that out, it starts decomposing,” he said at the workshop. “And if, you know, you’re kind of putting all that permafrost carbon in the bank slowly over tens of thousands of years and then you thaw it out very quickly, it’s kind of a big pulse, potentially, into the atmosphere.”
There is evidence that such pulses are already underway. Work led by UAF researcher Jason Clark detected hotspots of methane emissions from Northwest Alaska beaver ponds. Methane is a particularly potent greenhouse gas and is known to be produced from permafrost thaw. The discovery of “is an example of a new disturbance regime, wrought by an ecosystem engineer, accelerating the effects of climate change in the Arctic,” said the 2023 study, which was coauthored by Tape, Jones and others at UAF, along with scientists from the National Park Service and the California Institute of Technology.
There are related effects. Though studies are preliminary, there is evidence that beavers are contributing to higher mercury levels in the water systems – and thus in fish populations. Permafrost thaw releases natural elemental mercury that is stored in frozen peat, and beavers stimulate that thaw.. Additionally, the beavers may be inadvertently helping to convert that elemental mercury into methylmercury, the form that is most dangerous to people and animals.
“Beavers bring a lot of wood to streams,” Matthew Mervyn, a graduate student who is studying the question in Canada’s Northwest Territories, said at the workshop. “Since the water slows down, it introduces more bacteria to methyl-ize the mercury.”
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Mervyn, with Canada’s Wilfrid Laurier University, is part of a Canadian-British program called Beavers and Socio-ecological Resilience in Inuit Nunangat, or BARIN. It focuses on the Arctic region of the Northwest Territories. There, Indigenous hunters were the first to document colonization of the Beaufort Sea coast by beavers, with the animals spotted in 2008 and 2009.
The benefits of beavers
But there is another side of beavers in the Arctic.
“If I had a T-shirt, it would say, ‘I love beavers.’ I love them. They’re the best things in the world,” Lance Kramer, one of only about three Kotzebue residents who regularly trap beavers, said at the workshop.
He acknowledged that many of his Kotzebue neighbors greeted the news of beaver presence with the expression “Aiee,” a somewhat untranslatable Inupiaq expression of alarm and annoyance.
Kramer, in contrast, has taken advantage of the new arrivals. When he traps a fat beaver, he can use it for meat. The meat from skinny beavers goes to his dog, he said. He is making money selling the pelts. He has created his own detailed map of beaver lodges in the area, with names like “Faceplant Place Lodge” “About Time Lodge” and “Mad Snowman Lake Lodge,” the latter so named because his son became so annoyed about waiting for him to show up there that he built a snowman with an angry face.
He has even taken his love of beavers to show business, albeit subtly. He was an actor in the Alaska-based HBO series True Detective: The Night Country, and in a tense scene where his character brandishes a gun at law enforcement officers, he is wearing a beaver hat made by his mother-in-law.
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Kramer brought up other beaver benefits. Aside from supplying meat, fur and income, beavers make it easier for him to hunt or trap other animals that gather at the structures, like wolverines and minks. “You can get everything at a beaver lodge. It’s a one-stop shop,” he said.
Evidence, mostly from outside of Alaska, shows that beaver lodges and dams can create habitat for other species, from insects to birds to predators. Research into that is continuing through the A-BON program; one project, explained by UAF graduate student Sebastian Zavoico, is using sound recorders to track bird diversity at recently established Alaska beaver sites.
While many Arctic residents are leery about the impacts of beaver dams and lodges to fish, evidence gathered to date paints a mixed picture.
In the Lower 48, where many riparian systems have been damaged by development, beavers are often considered restorers. Numerous studies there have found that beaver colonization is good for fish.
In Alaska, where study of the beaver-fish relationship is just starting, the evidence is that the animals have been positive influences in some spots and negative in others, according to information presented at the conference by UAF graduate student William Samuel. He has been tracking the relationship between beavers and Arctic grayling – and the relationship between beavers, grayling and wildfire. Within Interior Alaska, he found strong evidence that beaver densities increased in burned areas and that the combination of beavers and fires could be bad for grayling.
But the presence of beavers can make forested areas resistant to fires, too. Dammed areas can serve as fire breaks and help speed ecosystem recovery after wildfires, research in the Lower 48 has found.
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The “beaver fever” name notwithstanding, beavers may not be as responsible as people think for giardia infections, said Glynnis Hood, an environmental science professor at the University of Alberta. “Beavers always get the rap, but humans carry giardia, too, and they don’t always clean up after themselves,” she said at the workshop.
Entrenched in the tundra landscape?
Future action on beavers might address both negative and positive aspects, suggested Andy Bassich of Eagle, an Interior community near the Canadian border.
“I don’t want, really, to use the word ‘infestation,’ but in some people’s minds that’s the appropriate word,” he said. In his region, where beavers have long been established, the animals have become a good source of food that substitutes for traditional food sources like salmon that are in short supply, he said.
If people want to get rid of “nuisance beavers” that might be blocking fish passage or creating other problems, perhaps there should be some kind of combined economic and cultural program that trains young people to hunt and trap them, process them, tan the hides, providing both meat and income, Bassich said.
Whatever Alaskans and Arctic residents decide to do about them, beavers may be in the far north for good.
That was a lesson imparted by Lennie Emaghok, an elder from Tuktoyaktuk, a Northwest Territories Inupiat community on the Beaufort Sea coast.
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He recounted how in 2020, along a relatively short stretch of creek, he and others found 10 beaver structures and quickly removed most of them, including one that was particularly towering.
“When we returned three days later, the dam was built back, as if we had never touched it,” he said.
Hood summarized the power of the wood-chomping rodent. “Never underestimate a beaver,” she said.
Alaska Beacon is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Alaska Beacon maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Andrew Kitchenman for questions: [email protected]. Follow Alaska Beacon on Facebook and Twitter.
After a litany of abysmal issues reported with Boeing jets, the inner windshield of Alaska Airlines’ Boeing 737 jet cracked open while landing at Portland International Airport.
The Alaska Airlines flight’s windshield cracked as it started to descend on the Portland International Airport on Sunday night (Mar 17).
The Boeing 737-800 jet had 159 passengers and 6 crew members aboard when a small crack appeared on its inner windshield.
“The crew followed their checklists and the aircraft continued safely to its destination as scheduled. Alaska Airlines’ 737 fleet is outfitted with five-layer windscreens that have an outer pane, three inner layers and an inner pane,” said the airline, in a statement.
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“If an inner pane cracks, the other pane and layers can maintain cabin pressure,” the statement added.
Alaska Airlines said that the authorities will inspect the aircraft and the engineers on the ground will carry out the repair.
The crack appeared on the windshield after Boeing planes reported a series of mishaps since the beginning of the year.
“Safety is our highest priority and is at the centre of everything we do,” said Kirby, in an email to customers.
“Unfortunately, in the past few weeks, our airline has experienced a number of incidents that are reminders of the importance of safety,” said Scott Kirby.
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“While they are all unrelated, I want you to know that these incidents have our attention and have sharpened our focus,” he added.
Not the first time…
This is not the first time such a crack has been reported in a Boeing jet.
Japan’s biggest airline All Nippon Airways (ANA) in January reported that the cockpit window of its Boeing jet had suffered a crack.
Boeing 737-800 had developed a crack in the cockpit window midair.
All Nippon Airways (ANA) spokesperson said that no injuries were reported in the incident and that all 59 passengers and six crew members aboard the flight had been safe.
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Watch: United Airlines finds loose bolts on multiple Boeing 737 Max 9 planes
The crack was found on the outermost of four layers of windows which surrounded the cockpit, said the spokesperson.
“The crack was not something that affected the flight’s control or pressurization,” the spokesperson said.
The ANA Flight 1182 was flying to the southern Toyama airport, however, it returned to the northern Sapporo-New Chitose airport after the crack was discovered.