Cold (42 page)

At least one document held by the Alaska State Libraries Historical Collections suggests that there was some interest in attempting
to maintain the Hickel Highway (Alaska Department of Highway Photograph Collection, Walter Hickel [“Haul Road”] Construction,
1968–1969, PCA 82). Today many Alaskans, especially those working on the North Slope, refer to the Dalton Highway (the existing
paved road between Fairbanks and Deadhorse that leads to the North Slope oil fields) as the Haul Road, not knowing that the
Hickel Highway was also called the Haul Road. The routes for the two roads were not the same. Surprisingly few Alaskans have
heard of the short-lived Hickel Highway.

Anchorage, although it is a relatively small city surrounded by undeveloped land and the sea, has had difficulties meeting
federal clean air standards. For a full description of the situation, see “Clean Air Act Reclassification; Anchorage, Alaska,
Carbon Monoxide Nonattainment Area” (December 2, 1997,
Federal Register,
vol. 62, no. 231).

Richard Byrd’s experience with chronic carbon monoxide poisoning during his solo adventure in Antarctica is described in the
August chapter. In his circumstances, levels could easily have risen to a point at which death was inevitable.

My house was flooded by a broken pipe while I was away overnight. When I returned, a distressing stream of water was flowing
under the garage door, and the water in the downstairs rooms was ankle-deep.

Independence Mine State Historical Park is open to the public during the summer. Many of the mining buildings have been restored.
Although visitors can walk around the grounds and hike into the surrounding mountains, none of the tunnels is open to visitors.

MAY

Although it seems unlikely that anyone can say for certain, most specialists seem to think that the carrying capacity of the
Arctic steppe would have been somewhat less than that of temperate and tropical large-mammal havens today, such as the Serengeti.

Dan O’Neill’s
The Last Giant of Beringia: The Mystery of the Bering Land Bridge
(2004, Basic Books, New York) tells the story of the scientific investigation of Beringia, focusing mainly on work by Dave
Hopkins.

Postglacial rebound, also called continental rebound, isostatic rebound, isostatic adjustment, and isostatic recovery, is
complex. As glaciers and ice sheets melt, land rises quickly in what is sometimes called elastic rebound. Later, the rate
of rise decreases exponentially. Rebound rates today may be one inch every two or three years — difficult to measure but nevertheless
rapid by geological standards. Rebound rates are measured using various methods, including surveying methods that rely on
sophisticated GPS networks.

Evelyn C. Pielou’s
After the Ice Age: The Return of Life to Glaciated North America
(1991, University of Chicago Press, Chicago) gives a much more detailed and technical account of many of the events associated
with the end of the last period of extensive glaciation.

Kettle lakes are common in Alaska and throughout the north, but they are often mixed with other lake types, such as thaw lakes
and oxbow lakes.

Plant and animal ranges continue to change, with the plants’ and animals’ entry into new areas assisted and accelerated by
human corridors. For example, roads provide disturbed ground that allows certain plants to set seed with limited competition
from long-established species that occupy most of the ground in undisturbed areas. Similarly, roads provide paths for animal
movement. Radio-collared animals, such as wolves and caribou, often follow roads.

The first site where Clovis artifacts were found and the nearby Black-water Draw Museum can be visited just outside Portales,
New Mexico. When the Blackwater Draw Site was found during highway construction in 1932, bones were displayed in a Portales
store as a curiosity. Edgar Howard, an archaeologist who was intrigued when he was presented with a fluted spear point by
a resident of Clovis, New Mexico, excavated the site from 1932 to 1936 and referred to it as “the Clovis Site.” (It was renamed
the Blackwater Draw Site by E. H. Sellards many years later.) No human remains were discovered, but a number of stone and
bone tools were found, along with bones from mammoths, shovel-toothed mastodons, ancient bison, horses (species that predated
the Spanish introduction of European horses to North America), tapirs, camels, llamas, dire wolves, ground sloths, short-faced
bears, and saber-toothed tigers.

The scientists interviewed for the newspaper article about their paper on mosquito evolution were Christina Holzapfel and
William Bradshaw, both of the University of Oregon. The two scientists published the article “Evolutionary Response to Rapid
Climate Change” in the prestigious academic journal
Science
(June 9, 2006, vol. 312, pp. 1477–78). Among other things, the
Science
article said, “Studies show that over the recent decades, climate change has led to heritable genetic changes in populations
as diverse as birds, squirrels, and mosquitoes.” However, the authors also point out that an ability to evolve in response
to rapid climate change “does not, in itself, ensure that a population will survive.”

Richard Stone’s
Mammoth: The Resurrection of an Ice Age Giant
(2001, Perseus Publishing, Cambridge, MA) offers a thorough and readable history of the recovery of mammoth bones and frozen
carcasses. Stone to some degree highlights investigations into the possible rebirth of the mammoth through the use of cloning
technology applied to tissue samples recovered from permafrost.

The quotation from Eugene Pfizenmayer, one of the scientists sent by the Russian Imperial Academy of Science to retrieve the
frozen mammoth carcass from the bank of the Berezovka River in 1901–1902, comes from Pfizenmayer’s
Siberian Man and Mammoth
(1939, Blackie and Son, London). This book describes both the reality of digging up mammoth remains and the rigors of traveling
and living in Siberia in the early part of the twentieth century. Pfizenmayer’s trip provides a contrast to Bering’s trip
across Siberia two hundred years earlier.

The Discovery Channel produced two documentaries about the Jarkov mammoth,
Raising the Mammoth
(2000) and
Land of the Mammoth
(2000).

A well-known North Slope wildlife biologist also commented on the freezer-burned taste of preserved meat during a public radio
interview after tasting centuries-old frozen whale meat discovered in a long-abandoned ice cellar.

Northstar Island, also known as Seal Island, is a man-made gravel island in water about thirty feet deep six miles north of
Prudhoe Bay.

Elisha Kent Kane described the expedition in
Arctic Explorations: The Second Grinnell Expedition in Search of Sir John Franklin,
1853, 54, 55 (reprint, 1996, Lakeside Press, Chicago). Kane provides yet another account of the fortitude required to survive
multiyear strandings in the Arctic. Without intending to do so, he also looks somewhat foolish in his inability to learn from
the local people who lived near his stranded vessel. Greely carried Kane’s writings, among others, on his disastrous expedition
in 1881.

The 1984 expedition to find the remains of Sir John Franklin and his crew is described in Owen Beattie and John Geiger’s
Frozen in Time: Unlocking the Secrets of the Doomed
1845
Arctic Expedition
(1990, Plume Printing, New York). The book includes color photographs of the disinterred bodies of Petty Officer John Torrington
and Able Seaman John Hartnell, both dead and frozen for more than a century but looking as if they could have been buried
less than a week.

Brenda Fowler’s
Iceman: Uncovering the Life and Times of a Prehistoric Man Found in an Alpine Glacier
(2001, University of Chicago Press, Chicago) provides a detailed account of the Iceman’s discovery and exhumation, including
the political machinations of various parties interested in this unusual find.

On October 15, 2004, Helmut Simon, one of the hikers who had discovered the Iceman, set out from Bad Hofgastein in Salzburg,
Austria, on what should have been a four-hour hike. He did not return as planned. More than eighteen inches of snow had fallen.
Simon died in the snow and cold of the mountains, just as the Iceman had thousands of years earlier.

Airman Leo Mustonen’s story was told in dozens of newspapers, from Hawaii to Florida, suggesting the human-interest appeal
of frozen human remains.

The museum housing the Iceman is in Bolzano, Italy. The Iceman’s frozen carcass can be observed through a small window.

The dryas — specifically,
Dryas octopetala,
also called mountain avens — gave its name to two cold periods, or stadials, that occurred after the last glacial period
of the Pleistocene Ice Age. The Younger Dryas, sometimes called the Big Freeze, lasted about thirteen hundred years, starting
about thirteen thousand years ago. The Older Dryas lasted only a few hundred years, starting about fourteen thousand years
ago. Stadials such as these (and the Little Ice Age) remind us of the variability of climate, but this variability should
not be confused with the kind of variability that is occurring now, which appears to be much more significant and linked to
greenhouse gas emissions.

JUNE

According to the Environmental Protection Agency, burning a gallon of gasoline releases almost twenty pounds of carbon dioxide.
Many carbon footprint calculators are available on the Internet. The carbon footprint of even environmentally conscious people
is shocking. No one would willingly and knowingly dump ten or twenty pounds (or more) of garbage from their car during the
daily commute to and from work, yet that is exactly what most people do every day.

Joseph Fourier’s 1827 essay “Mémoire sur les températures du globe terrestre et des espaces planétaires” (“Report on the Temperature
of the Earth and Planetary Spaces,”
Mémoires de l’Académie Royale des Sciences,
vol. 7, pp. 569–604) is often cited as the first description of the greenhouse effect. To some degree, it appears to be a
rehashing or refinement of Fourier’s 1824 paper “Remarques générales sur les températures du globe terrestre et des espaces
planétaires” (“Remarks on the Temperature of the Earth and Planetary Spaces,”
Annales de Chemie et de Physique,
vol. 27, pp. 136–67). His papers have to be read in the context of the times. One would not expect someone working in 1827
to have even a rudimentary understanding of the current knowledge of heat exchange and atmospheric physics, so readers should
not expect Fourier’s papers to offer any more than a hint of the truth as we understand it today.

Guy Callendar’s first paper on climate change and carbon dioxide seems to have been “The Artificial Production of Carbon Dioxide
and Its Influence on Temperature” (1938,
Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society,
vol. 64, pp. 223–37).

Carbon dioxide dissolved in water is an acid. The impact of ocean acidification is only beginning to be understood, but it
may turn out that acidification equals or exceeds climate change in its ability to disrupt ecosystems and affect the lives
of humans.

A paper by Roger Revelle and Hans Suess titled “Carbon Dioxide Exchange Between Atmosphere and Ocean and the Question of an
Increase of Atmospheric CO
₂
During the Past Decades” (1957,
Tellus
, vol. 9, pp. 18–27) is often considered to be an especially significant paper in the development of current thinking about
climate change.

On May 15, 2008, the polar bear was listed as “threatened” under the Endangered Species Act. The listing was driven primarily
by loss of sea ice habitat. Under the act, a species is considered “endangered” if it is at risk of extinction in all or a
substantial portion of its natural range in the foreseeable future and “threatened” if it is at risk of becoming “endangered”
in the foreseeable future.

Bob Carter was quoted in the
Canada Free Press
in a June 12, 2006, article called “Scientists Respond to Gore’s Warnings of Climate Catastrophe.” The article goes on to
say that most of Gore’s climate change supporters are not climate change experts and that many climate change experts are
not strong supporters of predictions of widespread and rapid climate change. Predictably, Carter was promptly attacked from
some quarters and praised from others.

The quotation from Richard Lindzen comes from an August 1, 2006, article by Lindzen. The article was published by the Heartland
Institute in
Environment and Climate News
under the title “No Climate Change.” Lindzen describes Gore’s vision as “shrill alarmism.” Lindzen is widely cited for challenging
claims of a “consensus” among scientists regarding climate change.

The Patrick Michaels quotation comes from a June 21, 2005, article by Ker Than called “How Global Warming Is Changing the
Animal Kingdom” in
Live Science
. Michaels does not argue against climate change but rather points out that not every change in animal and plant communities
is linked to or caused by climate change. “It’s not all a result of human induced climate change,” he is quoted as saying.
“Half of it is at best, probably less than half.”

The information about changes in how the frozen body of James Bedford was stored comes from an article called “Dear Dr. Bedford
(and Those Who Will Care for You after I Do),” published in the July 1991 issue of
Cryonics,
available at
http://www.alcor.org/Library/html/BedfordLetter.htm
. The author of the article, Michael Darwin, is difficult to reach but is widely recognized as an important figure in the
field of cryonics. The quotations from John Baust and Arthur Rowe come from the Alcor Institute’s Web site. It is refreshing
to see an organization involved in a controversial endeavor that is willing to quote its critics.

The Arthur C. Clarke quotation is from a letter written in support of a legal case on June 20, 1989. Although Clarke is perhaps
best known for his science fiction, which includes 2001
: A Space Odyssey
and
Childhood’s End,
he seems to have seen endless possibilities coming from scientific advances. In his letter supporting the possibility of
successfully preserving human life through cryonics, when he wrote, “Although no one can quantify the probability of cryonics
working, I estimate it is at least 90% — and certainly
nobody
can say it is zero,” Clarke underlined “nobody” and signed the letter “best wishes.” The letter is available at
http://www.alcor.org/Library/html/declarations.html
.