Northwest Passage rowers Denis Barnett and Paul Gleeson row their ocean-going craft into their stopping point of Cambridge Bay, Nunavut.

Photo courtesy MainStream Last First.

Beavers and jet skis surprised four adventurers on their recent attempt to row through the Northwest Passage. Vancouver, British Columbia residents Kevin Vallely, Paul Gleeson, Frank Wolf and Denis Barnett are now back home after the team stopped short of its goal of gliding through the northern waterway on muscle power.

The SS Manhattan on its 1969 journey from Pennsylvania through the Northwest Passage to Alaska and then back to New York.

Merritt Helfferich photo.

Forty-six years ago, a ship long as the Empire State Building sailed with intention toward obstacles that captains usually avoid. The icebreaking tanker SS Manhattan was an oil company’s attempt to see if it might be profitable to move new Alaska oil to the East Coast by plowing through the ice-clogged Northwest Passage.

A whale-watching platform made of and sitting on sea ice north of Barrow.

Photo by Ned Rozell.

Despite taking up as much space as Australia, the blue-white puzzle of ice floating on the Arctic Ocean is an abstraction to the billions who have never seen it. But continued shrinkage of sea ice is changing life for many living things. A few Alaska scientists added their observations to a recent journal article on the subject.

Pausing on a trip this spring from Deadhorse to Baffin Island, permafrost researchers Kenji Yoshikawa and Ulli Neumann at Moose Kerr School in Aklavik in Canada’s Northwest Territories. About 150 students attend the K-12 school.

Photo courtesy Kenji Yoshikawa.

A few months ago, I wrote about adventurer/permafrost scientist Kenji Yoshikawa’s attempt to drive a snowmachine 3,500 miles from Prudhoe Bay to the Atlantic Ocean. He planned to stop along the way to visit students in 13 villages. Near their schools, he wanted to drill holes in the ground and see how cold it is.

In late April, after 43 days of travel, he and Ulli Neumann quietly executed that endeavor. From Deadhorse they bumped, bashed and slid their way to the Baffin Island village of Iqaluit.

NASA's Seasat satellite in orbit in 1978. The payload at the bottom of the satellite contains the first synthetic aperture radar NASA ever put in space.

Photo by NASA.

 A time capsule of satellite imagery of the earth will become available to scientists this month.

On June 28, digital imagery from more than three decades ago will be released by the Alaska Satellite Facility at the University of Alaska Fairbanks Geophysical Institute, NASA’s processor and distributor for this type of data. The images reveal an unprecedented view of sea ice, waves, forests, glaciers and more.

Grad student Joanna Young drills a hole into the Susitna Glacier for a weather station and a melt stake to be installed in April 2012.

Photo by Regine Hock.

Every summer, Alaska’s glaciers melt and send vast quantities of water gushing through silty gray rivers, past towns and villages and finally into the sea. Some glaciers calve directly into the ocean, instantly losing car-sized chunks of ice and wowing boats full of tourists.

The world’s melting glaciers are boosting ocean levels 0.71 millimeters a year, accounting for roughly one-third of total sea level rise, according to a recent study.

A student drills an ice core at the UAF Sea Ice Field Course in Barrow.

Photo by Molly Rettig

The trick to getting a good ice core is to drill straight down into the sea ice, continually clear the slush gurgling up from the ocean, correctly reassemble the core fragments on the tray, take its temperature every couple of inches before it melts or cools, and saw it into hockey-puck-sized chunks without dropping them in the snow.

And, of course, not drop the heavy drill blade on your foot or frostbite your fingers in the process.

Brower Frantz about a mile north of Point Barrow scouting the sea ice for a group of UAF researchers in March.

Photo courtesy Brower Frantz

On the 5-mile snowmachine ride up to Point Barrow, we saw several fresh polar bear tracks the size of dinner plates, a pile of whalebones from last year, and a 3-foot-wide crack in the sea ice that could swallow a sled. The crack was created when an ice floe in the open water crashed into shore-fast ice.

It was masked in a snowdrift, and our guide Brower Frantz nearly fell into it.

Kenji Yoshikawa in his garage in Fairbanks.

Photo by Ned Rozell.

Kenji Yoshikawa will soon sleep on brilliant, blue-white landscape that has never felt the imprint of his boots. Beginning on spring equinox, the permafrost scientist and a partner will attempt to drive snowmachines from Prudhoe Bay to Canada’s Baffin Island.

While traveling a distance equal to Seattle to Tokyo to Seattle over land and sea ice, Yoshikawa will camp outside villages in an Arctic Oven tent. Along the way, stopping at village schools in Canada’s far north, he will drill holes in the ground and snake in strings of thermometers to record permafrost temperatures.

SAN FRANCISCO — Northern sea ice is at its lowest summer coverage since we’ve been able to see it from satellites. Greenland experienced its warmest summer in 170 years. Eight of 10 permafrost-monitoring sites in northern Alaska recorded their highest temperatures; the other two tied record highs.

2012 was a year of “astounding” change for much of the planet north of the Arctic Circle, said four experts at a press conference here at the Fall Meeting of the American Geophysical Union, a five-day gathering of more than 20,000 scientists that ended Dec. 7, 2012.