Innholdsfortegnelse for January-February 2016 i Audubon Magazine

CANADA EXTRACTION THE RUSH This fl are burning off excess natural gas on King Christian Island is a beacon of the rich deposits buried beneath Canada’s frigid northern reaches. Oil and gas fi elds have been discovered here, on nearby Ellesmere Island, and in the Mackenzie Delta, as well as off shore in the Beaufort Sea; in all, these remote locales are estimated to hold more than 8 billion barrels of oil. Milder conditions and the opening of new shipping routes as sea ice shrinks have companies planning to tap these resources— as well as the region’s vast nickel, iron, and diamond deposits—to an extent never before possible. ICELAND INNOVATION LOCKED UP You’re looking at carbon dioxide that has been turned to stone. Geothermal energy provides nearly 70 percent of…

TO MAKE AN EXPEDITION BY ICEBREAKER IN THE modern American Arctic, you fl y to the gold-rush city of Nome, Alaska, our country’s former future Arctic port, in a commercial jet that is half taken up by cargo, half by passengers. In the gravel airport parking lot at 64.5 degrees north, you hail a cab—an old 4x4 van—for the $8 ride to town. Then you wait. If the weather is clear, you can see the Healy, America’s newest and sometimes only functional polar icebreaker, anchored at the horizon. If the waves are small, you can expect a phone call: Get to the dock. If the waves are small but a storm is coming, you can expect the tone to be urgent: Hurry. There are three main roads leaving this 3,800-person…

IN JANUARY 2012 JORGEN BERGE AND TWO COLLEAGUES WERE tooling around Kongsfjorden, on the coast of Svalbard, in a small rubber boat with an outboard motor. The fjord, a stopover site on a two-week-long sea-ice research cruise, provided a rare opportunity to look for marine life in shallow, open waters in the high north during the dead of winter. It was the middle of the night, but the hour didn’t really matter: In the Arctic at that time of year, darkness coats everything, day and night. As does a bitter cold, so the three Norwegian scientists had donned heavily insulated, traffi c-coneorange suits accented with refl ective strips—helpful should anyone tumble into the icy water and require rescue. As the team motored along, an eerie glow began to surround them.…

SPECTACLED EIDER Scientifi c Name: Somateria fi scheri Range: Coastal areas of western and northern Alaska and northern Siberia. The duck’s entire population winters on sea ice near St. Lawrence Island in the northern Bering Sea. Habitat: Saltmarsh and freshwater wetlands, usually within 10 to 12 miles of the coast. Status: Federally listed as threatened; steep and continuing declines (more than 95 percent) in Alaskan populations since 1960s. Threats/Outlook: High levels of lead poisoning from spent shotgun pellets used in subsistence hunting. Because the entire global population winters in a restricted area, even a small oil spill at the wrong time could be catastrophic. IN 1741 VITUS BERING SAILED HIS 14-GUN, 360-TON BRIG St. Peter along the southern edge of the sea that would later bear his name. After reaching…

AUDUBON HAS BEEN WORKING TO PROTECT THE ARCTIC for decades. Two years ago our Alaska-based scientists and policy team were instrumental in securing the protection of more than 11 million acres on Alaska’s North Slope. But other parts of the fragile ecosystem of Arctic Alaska remain under threat. One of the most prolifi c bird nurseries on the planet, the 19.3-million-acre Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, supports millions of birds that migrate to all 50 states and to every continent, including shorebirds, such as the American Golden-Plover, and songbirds, Sandhill Cranes, Snowy Owls, Golden Eagles, and many more. Unfortunately, when Congress designated most of the original refuge as wilderness in 1980, it left out the coastal plain, a 1.5-million-acre region between the Arctic Ocean and the towering mountains of the Brooks…

THERE WAS A SLIGHT COMPLICATION THE FI RST TIME Bryce Robinson rappelled from the lip of a Seward Peninsula tundra cliff onto a ledge occupied by a family of Gyrfalcons. Robinson, a 29-year-old graduate student at Boise State University, sported a magnifi cent beard that reached to the second button of his fl annel shirt. It was dense, Claus-like, brown as burnt umber, and as Robinson eased down from the cliff it got caught in the belay device that held the young scientist fast to his climbing rope. Dangling above a broad tundra river, Robinson watched in horror as a fi st-sized wad of dark hair jammed in the climbing apparatus like weeds in a string trimmer. He couldn’t go up, he couldn’t go down. His only option made him…

COMPARED TO EVEN THE MOST BASIC HOUSES IN THE LOWER 48, Elena Bodfi sh’s family home in Wainwright, Alaska, is modest. The cloud-gray, weathered two-story has no fl ush toilet, just a “honey bucket” that has to be emptied by hand; according to family lore, the house was built on a foundation made from the salvaged wood of an old shipwreck. But the place has its charms: It sits just above the beach on Alaska’s northern coast, and it has a picture window that looks out on the Chukchi Sea, a fi nger of the A rctic Ocean. Sometimes, between spring and fall, you can glimpse walruses and seals passing by on their migration routes. So Bodfi sh’s mother wasn’t happy when she learned years ago that they might have…