Published Mar 30, 2023 by Rod Boyce

Specialized portable radar could serve as an early warning system to reduce risk for humans working on shorefast sea ice, according to a recently published study.

The researchers suggest that use of portable interferometric radar can quickly reveal small changes that could indicate imminent movement or detachment of the ice, which is important as climate change affects ice behavior. The capability could also be useful for near-coastal navigation.

“If you want to learn about what makes the shorefast ice go unstable and detach from the coast, we need to be able to detect some early warning signals,” said research assistant professor Andy Mahoney of the University of Alaska Fairbanks Geophysical Institute.

Shorefast ice—also known as landfast ice—is ice that’s attached to the shore.

“Satellites give you snapshots that are separated by hours if not days,” he said. “This portable ground-based system can be looking continuously for signs of instability.”

Interferometric radar differs from regular radar in that it compares two different images of an object to identify small changes in the distance to it. By collecting a near-continuous time series of data from a single location, the coast-based interferometric radar can measure the compression or stretching of sea ice before it fails. It also can detect small cracks that might go unnoticed by observers on the ice. 

Published Mar 30, 2023 by Staff report

University of Alaska Fairbanks hockey coach Erik Largen is a finalist for the Penrose Award, given annually to the American Hockey Coaches Association NCAA Div. I Men’s Ice Hockey Coach of the Year.

Largen, a first-time finalist for the award, led the Nanooks to a 22-10-2 record and a 15th-place finish in the Pairwise Rankings. UAF’s season highlights included wins over Top 20 opponents Denver and Notre Dame, in addition to a six-game sweep of Alaska-Anchorage.

The 22 wins is tied for the third-most in program history and is the most by a Nanooks team since the 2001-02 season. UAF played 21 of its 34 games on the road and set a new road-win record going 12-8-1 on visiting ice while maintaining a 10-2-1 record at home in the Carlson Center.

Other finalists are Pat Ferschweiler of Western Michigan; Bob Motzko of Minnesota; Brandon Naurato of Michigan; Jay Pandolfo of Boston University; Rand Pecknold of Quinnipiac; Joe Shawhan of Michigan Tech; and Wayne Wilson of RIT.

Published Mar 30, 2023 by Taylor Heckart

From Feb. 26 through March 1, three members of UAA’s student government, USUAA, along with other students representing other UA campuses, flew out to Juneau to advocate for legislation that would impact the university. 

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The students who attended the trip were USUAA student body president Katie Scoggin, USUAA Senator and Public Relations Officer Hannah Huber and USUAA Senator and Chair of Student Academic Affairs Macchlessy Dinganga. 

UAA students only had 15 minutes at a time with legislators, and they were often paired with other advocacy groups. Scoggin said some meetings were relaxed, while some could be quite stressful depending on the legislator. 

One of the pieces of legislation that USUAA representatives asked legislators to support was House Bill 10, also known as the Textbook Cost Transparency Act. House Bill 10 would require University of Alaska courses to provide descriptions of required course materials, disclose any zero-cost materials, and disclose any associated fees that would be required for those materials. 

Scoggin says that this bill would be another step in transparency for students, and help college students better budget for the classes they take.

Another bill that students advocated for is House Bill 31, which would bring massive changes to the current Alaska Performance Scholarship. House Bill 31 would increase funding to each tier of the Alaska Performance Scholarship, making the highest tier $7,000 instead of $4,775, the middle tier $5,250 instead of $3,566, and the lowest tier $3,500 instead of $2,378. The bill would also increase Alaska Performance Scholarship eligibility to eight years after high school graduation instead of six. 

Scoggin said that one final priority of the trip was talking to legislators about deferred maintenance. With emergency telephones down, a broken elevator in East Hall, boiler failures in Rasmussen Hall and the Professional Studies Building, pipe failures, flooding, and more happening this semester, UAA has asked for substantial funding in deferred maintenance costs this year. 

Published Mar 30, 2023 by Scienmag

Scientists often look to the past for clues about how Earth’s landscapes might shift under a changing climate, and for insight into the migrations of human communities through time. A new study offers both by providing, for the first time, a reconstruction of prehistoric temperatures for some of the first known North American settlements.

The study, published in Quaternary Science Reviews, uses new techniques to examine the past climate of Alaska’s Tanana Valley. With a temperature record that reaches back 14,000 years, researchers now have a glimpse into the environment that supported humans living at some of the continent’s oldest archaeological sites, where mammoth bones are preserved alongside evidence of human occupation. Reconstructing the past environment can help scientists understand the importance of the region for human migration into the Americas.

“When you think about what was happening in the Last Glacial Maximum, all these regions on Earth were super cold, with massive ice sheets, but this area was never fully glaciated,” says Jennifer Kielhofer, Ph.D., a paleoclimatologist at DRI and lead author of the study. “We’re hypothesizing that if this area was comparatively warm, maybe that would have been an attractive reason to come there and settle.”