Old Times, in Air
I now gratefully return this column to Ned Rozell, with thanks to the many people who've provided comments and corrections--especially Dr. Steve Maclean for the paper establishing that the ice worm is a true worm, always a worm, and never a midge, and for John Holland's report that Brooks Range old-timers suspected the weather warmed at the full moon.
Writing this column has given me a legitimate reason to greet my scientist friends and acquaintances with, "What's up, Doc?" Many of them helpfully take time to assuage that curiosity, producing answers and copies of their publications so I can read about what is up. Recently, friend Bob Elsner provided the printed version of a speech he gave last year, at the 50th birthday party for Barrow's former Naval Arctic Research Laboratory. The main subject of the speech was acquaintance Pete Scholander, whose work at NARL made possible great advances in several fields of science--northern and otherwise.
The speech touched several themes that have cropped up now and again in this column. One might be called the Rodney Dangerfield Effect-Alaska scientists have a tough time gaining and keeping respect in Alaska. As time passes, it's as if their accomplishments somehow get assigned to common knowledge, as if nobody in particular ever had the remarkable insight or pursued the painstaking research.
In Scholander's case, the nearly forgotten insight came from his observation of small invertebrates that spent their Barrow winters embedded in ice. To figure out how they could stay alive in what looked like a glassy tomb, he needed to know about gas diffusion through ice, how well oxygen could get to the tiny animals and carbon dioxide could be carried away. He found that little had been published on the subject, and so devised and carried out a series of simple experiments to measure gases' diffusion rates through ice.
Scholander' s measurements indicated that oxygen and carbon dioxide diffuse extremely slowly through thin layers of ice. Inspired, he managed to launch some small expeditions to mountain and tidewater glaciers with the aim of testing that view thoroughly. The test succeeded, showing that gases diffused through ice at rates no more than 1/40,000th of the rates at which they diffused through water.
From those measurements, Scholander made a mental leap, an idea Elsner called "one of the more remarkable scientific inferences of the century." Elsner's speech quoted the 1956 paper in which Scholander and his colleagues first offered the concept: "Considering this extremely slow rate, the relatively enormous diffusion distances in the glacier, and the large quantity of gas held under pressure in the ice, it would seem possible that gas trapped in the glacier would remain unchanged for millennia. Analysis of such gas could therefore give information about the atmospheric composition at the time the ice was formed..."
There you have it: that seltzer-like sizzle emitted by glacier ice in your drink could contain the exhalation of the last mammoth or the first polar bear. Those bubbles are the trapped leftovers of ancient atmospheres, not totally unmodified by time but largely so, enough to tell a great deal about the world's air thousands of years in the past-invaluable information for contemporary scientists struggling to fathom the vagaries of Earth's shifty climate. From deep cores taken at the polar extremes of Greenland and Antarctica, now the old air trapped in ice is revealing secrets of eons long gone.
And we all knew that breakthrough came courtesy of Dr. Per "Pete" Scholander, working right here in Alaska, didn't we? Hah. A second theme upon which I've ranted and which Elsner touched concerned a peculiarity of this breakthrough: It probably couldn't happen today. The Norwegian-born Scholander was a biologist in general, a physiologist in particular. Technically, he thus had no business following through on the source of an iceberg's sizzle--and today, he certainly wouldn't receive money to do so. In fact, a funding agency providing him the wherewithal to make leaps outside his proper field would probably find itself under Congressional investigation, instant prey for the bean-counters. I'm glad Scholander lived when he did, as he did--as the title of his autobiography has it, "Enjoying a Life in Science."
