From time to time, pieces
of Alaska science news find their way to my desk but don’t
emerge as a full newspaper column. Here’s a sampling.
- Aleutian goose continues comeback: The Aleutian
cackling goose, formerly known as the Aleutian Canada goose,
has recovered so well from near-extinction that officials in
Oregon—where the smaller cousin to the Canada goose spends
the winter—have taken the bird off the state’s endangered
species list. Biologists recently counted more than 64,000 birds
in Oregon. In 1962, Alaska biologist Bob “Sea Otter” Jones
found a few hundred birds on Buldir Island in the western Aleutians
when others thought the goose was extinct. The removal of foxes
from the Aleutians and the closure of hunting season on the birds’ wintering
grounds helped their recovery.
- Alaska almost knocked off No. 2 earthquake perch: Some
scientists calculated that the recent Sumatra earthquake that
caused the tsunami had a magnitude of 9.3, which would top Alaska’s
Good Friday earthquake’s 9.2. The scientists who calculated
the 9.3 used a model with incorrect fault geometry, though. A
more correct number for the Sumatra earthquake is 9.15, according
to Thorne Lay of the University of California at Santa Cruz,
who had a paper on the earthquake published in a special edition
of Science that featured the great Sumatra-Andaman Earthquake
of May 20, 2005. A Harvard researcher, Meredith Nettles, also
calculated that the Alaska earthquake was larger than the Sumatra
earthquake. The death toll from the Sumatra earthquake and tsunami
was more than 283,000, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.
The Alaska earthquake of 1964 killed 131 people, in Alaska, California
and Oregon.
- DEET delivers: A scientist who studies Alaska
seabirds that give off mosquito-repellant chemicals sent me a
paper from The New England Journal of Medicine that
was published in 2002, but had some good bug-related information
I had missed. Researchers at the University of Florida compared
commercial repellants on mosquitoes they breed at the Florida
Medical Entomology Laboratory. Deep Woods OFF!, with a 23.8 percent
mixture of the chemical DEET, “provided an average of five
hours of complete protection against (mosquito) bites after a
single application.” Mark Fradin and John Day, who co-authored
the study, wrote “only products containing DEET offer long-lasting
protection after a single application.” They also tested
Skin-So-Soft Bath Oil, and found it provided an average of 9.6
minutes of protection. Of DEET alternatives, the most effective
was a soybean-oil-based repellant that worked for about 1.5 hours.
They noted that repellants don’t work beyond 4 centimeters
from the site of application, and that garlic, vitamin B1, and
wearable devices that emit sounds don’t seem to work. The
authors also wrote, “DEET has a remarkable safety profile
after 40 years of use and nearly 8 billion human applications.
Fewer than 50 cases of serious toxic effects have been documented
in the medical literature since 1960.”
Alaska wildfires pump out the CO: During June through
August of 2004, forest fires in Alaska and Canada gave off as much
carbon monoxide as all the cars, trucks, factories, and woodstoves
in the Lower 48 in the same time period, according to Gabriele Pfister
at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado.
Carbon monoxide is a poisonous, odorless gas. During the worst of
the smoke that choked Fairbanks in June 2005, a CO-measuring instrument
in downtown Fairbanks recorded 9.2 parts per million of CO; typical
midsummer readings are 2 or 3 parts per million. |
|
 An
Aleutian cackling goose on Attu Island. Steve Ebbert photo.
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