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.