Then we cruise west, far north of Alaska, and all the way to Wrangel
Island, off the Arctic coast of Russia.
As the wind whips off the ice floes, I hunker down in my cold-
weather gear, sheltering in the leeward side of the bridge wing along-
side Drs. George Divoky and Brendan Kelly, of the University of Alaska
in Fairbanks. Each is on board the icebreaker to lead separate teams of
researchers: Kelly’s team conducting a survey of walruses, Divoky and
his assistants counting seabirds. For Kelly, it provides an opportunity
to conduct the first such survey in this region for several years: an espe-
cially important task, given the concerns about retreating sea ice and
its possible implication for walruses, which “haul out” and rest on the
sea ice.
Divoky hopes his survey will provide potential supporting evi-
dence for a thesis he has nurtured over three decades of research on
Cooper Island, just north of Barrow. Year after year, he has set up camp
here, and at times it has been an uncomfortable, discomfiting under-
taking. Encounters with polar bears are frequent, and Divoky recalls
one particular experience when he heard something in the middle of
the night and woke up the next morning to find bear tracks leading to
the edge of his tent, just inches from his head. But Divoky has perse-
vered, and as a result, he says, he has gathered evidence of what is
“among the first documented biological effects of climate change in
the Arctic.”
The focus of Divoky’s research is the black guillemot, a species of
seabird. Found throughout the higher latitudes of the Northern
Hemisphere, black guillemots have not been common in northern
Alaska since the seventeenth century, when global temperatures began
to fall and snow cover increased. That is relevant because, says Divoky,
the guillemots require 80 days between nesting on the ground and
hatching their eggs, but over the last 300 to 400 years, there have
rarely been 80 consecutive days on which the ground in northern
Alaska was snow-free. Until now.
In 1972, Divoky discovered ten pairs of guillemots on the island,
nesting in the remnants of ordinance that had been blown up in the
1950s. Over the next 18 years, the number of birds soared, peaking at
225 pairs in 1990. The increase was fueled, says Divoky, by warmer
Alaska and the Western Arctic 101