Snow, Ice & Permafrost Group
SAN FRANCISCO — For the thirteenth straight year, I’m happy to be spending one week of December here, at the Fall Meeting of the American Geophysical Union, where more than 15,000 scientists gather for a week to discuss the latest news of the world. 
In 1973, Elden Johnson was a young engineer with a job working on one of the most ambitious and uncertain projects in the world — an 800-mile steel pipeline that carried warm oil over frozen ground. Thirty-five years later, Johnson looked back at what he called “the greatest story ever told of man’s interaction with permafrost.”
Home of the trans-Alaska pipeline, Alaska has been the setting for a few epic engineering battles rendered against nature. The Million Dollar Bridge, spanning the lower Copper River, is a reminder of another improbable Alaska construction project.
One of the prettiest places in Southeast Alaska has felt some of nature’s most violent behavior.
The latest meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco in December 2011 featured hundreds of talks about Earth science, some of those relating to Alaska (and some of those comprehensible to a non-scientist). Here are a few items from the notebook I carried around the Moscone Center:
After a winter of outstanding snow conditions, three scientists drove snowmachines up Valdez Glacier this spring, curious to see how far they could get.
A scientist wearing plastic boots and crampons knelt on Gulkana Glacier and pointed at the king of beasts, a snow flea.
Minnesota is the Land of 10,000 Lakes, but Alaska has more than that in the great expanse of flatlands north of the Brooks Range. These ubiquitous far-north bodies of water — most of them formed by the disappearance of ancient, buried ice that dimples the landscape as it thaws — make the maps of Alaska’s coastal plain look like Swiss cheese.
FOX, ALASKA — Bison have not thundered through this neighborhood for thousands of years. But there’s one now, Matthew Sturm said, as he pointed to a horn cemented in a cold, dark wall 30 feet beneath the boreal forest.
It’s not often that glaciologists help with the recovery of long-lost human remains, but military officials recently enlisted Martin Truffer for that purpose. The University of Alaska Fairbanks Geophysical Institute professor and graduate student Dave Podrasky came up with useful information on a Southcentral glacier that held plane wreckage and the remains of military men killed in a crash 60 years ago.
