Posts Tagged ‘Lewis and Clark’
“The beaver told the rabbit as they stared at the Hoover Dam: ‘No, I didn’t build it myself, but it’s based on an idea of mine’.”*…
A warming climate is enabling rodents– notably beavers– to move north. Warren Cornwall reports…
In the summer of 2023, University of Alaska Fairbanks ecologist Ken Tape walked across the tundra on the outskirts of Nome, Alaska, to a site where a shallow stream just a few meters wide had flowed 2 years before. In its place he found an enormous pond, created by a dam made of branches bearing the distinctive marks of beaver incisors.
It was a vivid illustration of how beavers are transforming the Arctic. In Tape’s past work studying Arctic landscapes, such places changed little over decades. “It gives you a sense of timelessness,” he says. “With beavers, that couldn’t be further from the truth,” as the chunky rodents quickly replumb vast areas by building dams that can stretch hundreds of meters.
Soon, the land-altering power of beavers could be felt in a region currently beyond their reach: the farthest northern parts of the Alaskan Arctic. In a 30 July paper in Environmental Research Letters, Tape and James Speed of the Norwegian University of Science and Technology forecast that as a warming climate eases Arctic temperatures, beaver populations will march northward, sweeping across Alaska’s North Slope this century. Their arrival could bring dramatic change, the researchers say, upending ecosystems in places such as the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and accelerating the loss of permafrost that stores vast amounts of carbon…
… Today, satellite images show more than 11,000 beaver ponds dotting the Arctic tundra south of the Brooks Range, a wall of mountains running east to west that isolates the North Slope. The number there doubled from 2003 to 2017.
The end of widespread fur trapping, which has allowed beavers to recolonize many parts of North America where they had been eliminated, might be driving some of the increase. But the new analysis finds that rising average temperature is a major factor in the beavers’ advance.
Tape suspects warmer weather is critical because it means more unfrozen water in winter. A completely frozen pond can trap beavers in their lodges and make food caches inaccessible. Milder winters could preserve pockets of liquid water around springs or ponds. Melting permafrost also creates more groundwater-fed springs. And earlier spring thaws enable beavers to forage just as their food supplies dwindle.
“The ecological bottleneck for beavers is the end of winter,” Tape says. “Now imagine that comes 2 weeks earlier.”
Using computer models that forecast how a warming climate could expand the amount of Alaskan tundra suitable for beavers, the researchers found that the area dotted with ponds could nearly double by 2050, and more than triple by the end of the century, from 30,000 square kilometers to 99,000 square kilometers. In these scenarios, beavers would breach the Brooks Range and spread across the North Slope to the shores of the Beaufort Sea…
… Residents of the Arctic have mixed feelings about their new neighbors. Ezra Adams, a member of the Native Village of Noatak, just south of the Brooks Range, says his father first saw a beaver there in the late 1990s, when Adams was 6 years old. Now, the animals have altered his family’s way of life. Their dams have reduced creeks where Adams once caught whitefish and salmon to a trickle. When out trapping or gathering firewood in the winter, he must beware of breaking through the ice on beaver ponds. Whereas his father once drank straight from lakes in the backcountry, Adams now brings treated water to avoid giardia in beaver feces. There are some upsides. Adams uses beaver meat to bait traps and beaver pelts for garments. “They provide a lot for our trapping,” Adams says. “But then for the general population it would be beneficial if there weren’t as many.”
Researchers, too, see both risks and benefits in beaver expansion. New ponds could become hot spots for songbirds and other wildlife. But they also hasten the thaw of permafrost, promoting the release of planetwarming carbon dioxide. A soon-to-be-published survey of 11 beaver pond systems in Arctic Alaska, for example, found that the water-covered area increased more than 600% once beavers arrived. Nearby ground thawed so much that researchers could plunge 1.2-meter-long rods used to test permafrost all the way to the tip.
Ponds could also create ample new habitat for microorganisms that convert carbon to methane, an even more potent warming gas, Griffin notes. “If we are going to start having expansion of wetlands because of beaver dams, how is that going to tip the balance between carbon and methane?” he wonders.
He might soon find out. Tape has already stumbled on one beaver pond on the northern slope of the Brooks Range. Although it disappeared a few years later, the pond showed beavers can cross the mountains. To spread even farther north, Tape notes, “they just have to swim downstream.”…
A report on climate migration already underway: “Beavers are poised to invade and radically remake the Arctic,” from @science.org.
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As we give it up for Gaia, we might might recall that on this date in 1805, the Lewis and Clark expedition had reached the forks of the Jefferson River in Montana. Lewis and a small group had gone ahead scouting, and had sent back word, left in the form of a note pinned to a tree in the camp, for Clark and the rest of the party. But Clark never got the note, and headed down the branch (the Big Hole River) against which Lewis had warned… his canoes capsized and one of his party was injured. As they regrouped at their camp, a member of Lewis’ party arrived and explained that there had been a miscommunication. Clark’s journal entry for August 6, 1985 recounts:
… Capt Lewis had left a Letter on a pole in the forks informing me what he had discovered & the course of the rivers &c. this lettr was Cut down by the [beaver] as it was on a green pole & Carried off. Three Skins which was left on a tree was taken off by the Panthers or wolvers…
“The nature of an innovation is that it will arise at a fringe”*…
Alternative media outlets of the Left and Right have become a crucial supplement to our knowledge of the world, providing those perspectives usually ignored by our mainstream media...
From the masthead of the aggressively-inclusive site that means to make those views available, The Unz Review.
The collection is sufficiently vast that your correspondent cannot guarantee against any bias in its eclecticism (indeed, he notes that it is the work of Ron Unz). Still, it’s a remarkable aggregation of theory, opinion, and reportage, from what seems a broad array of points-of-view.
Readers are advised to steel themselves, take a deep breath… then dive in.
Pair with Wikipedia’s Fringe Theory page– and perhaps more interestingly still, their explanation in their editorial guidelines of how they identify and classify fringe theories.
[Image above: source]
* “The nature of an innovation is that it will arise at a fringe where it can afford to become prevalent enough to establish its usefulness without being overwhelmed by the inertia of the orthodox system.” — Kevin Kelly
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As we iris out, we might recall that it was on this date in 1804 that Corps of Discovery– better known today as the Lewis and Clark Expedition– left Camp Dubois, near Wood River, Illinois, commencing what would be a trek over two years on which they became the first American expedition to cross what is now the western portion of the United States.
President Thomas Jefferson had commissioned the expedition shortly after the Louisiana Purchase (in 1803) to explore and to map the newly acquired territory, to find a practical route across the western half of the continent– a Northwest Passage– and to establish an American presence in this territory before Britain and other European powers tried to claim it.
Meriwether Lewis and William Clark
“Wonder is the beginning of wisdom”*…
Depiction of a Dragon featured in Mundus Subterraneus
Just before Robert Hooke’s rightly famous microscopic observations of everything from the “Edges of Rasors” to “Vine mites” appeared in Micrographia in 1665, the insatiably curious and incredibly prolific Jesuit scholar Athanasius Kircher [see here] published what is in many ways a more spectacular work. Mundus Subterraneus (Underground world), a two-volume tome of atlas-like dimensions, was intended to lay out “before the eyes of the curious reader all that is rare, exotic, and portentous contained in the fecund womb of Nature.” There is an “idea of the earthly sphere that exists in the divine mind,” Kircher proclaimed, and in this book, one of more than thirty on almost as many subjects that he published during his lifetime, he tried to prove that he had grasped it.
As a French writer put it some years later, “it would take a whole journal to indicate everything remarkable in this work.” There were extended treatments on the spontaneous generation of living animals from non-living matter, the unethical means by which alchemists pretended to change base metals into gold, and the apparent tricks of nature we now recognize as fossils. The book included detailed charts of “secret” oceanic motions, or currents, among the first ever published. The author’s more or less correct explanation of how igneous rock is formed was also arguably the first in print. According to one modern scholar, Kircher “understood erosion,” and his entries “on the quality and use of sand” and his “investigations into the tending of fields” had their practical use.
Mundus Subterraneus identified the location of the legendary lost island of Atlantis (something that modern science hasn’t been able to accomplish) as well as the source of the Nile: it started in the “Mountains of the Moon,” then ran northward through “Guix,” “Sorgola,” and “Alata” and on into “Bagamidi” before reaching Ethiopia and Egypt. Kircher offered a lengthy discussion of people who lived in caves (their societies and their economy). He reported on the remains of giants (also mainly cave dwellers) found in the ground. And he went into detail on the kinds of lower animals who belong to the lower world (including dragons).
In short, Mundus Subterraneus covered almost every subject that might relate to the realm of earth, as well as many that wouldn’t seem to, such as the sun and “its special properties, by which it flows into the earthly world” and the “nature of the lunar body and its effects.” These correspondences and influences were nothing new, though perhaps only the always-inclusive Athanasius Kircher would choose to publish a series of moon maps in a book about the world below…
Portrait of Kircher at age 53 from Mundus Subterraneus
More on this extraordinary work– inspired in part by a subterranean adventure Kircher himself made into the bowl of Vesuvius– at John Glassie‘s “Athanasius, Underground“; browse the book at the Internet Archive.
* Socrates
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As we praise polymathy, we might recall that it was on this date in 1804 that Corps of Discovery– better known today as the Lewis and Clark Expedition– left Camp Dubois, near Wood River, Illinois, commencing what would be a trek over two years on which they became the first American expedition to cross what is now the western portion of the United States.
President Thomas Jefferson had commissioned the expedition shortly after the Louisiana Purchase (in 1803) to explore and to map the newly acquired territory, to find a practical route across the western half of the continent– a Northwest Passage– and to establish an American presence in this territory before Britain and other European powers tried to claim it.
Meriwether Lewis and William Clark
A Question of Perspective…
Readers may not yet have seen this DK production, originally intended for internal use, but now afloat on the web…
It was inspired by “Lost Generation,” which was itself inspired by the Argentinian political ad “The Truth” (for RECREAR candidate Lopez Murphy).
As we revisit our preconceptions, we might recall that it was on this date in 1806 that Lewis and Clark, having made it to the Pacific coast, foreshadowed the video(s) above: they reversed, and began their journey back East.
source: Smithsonian Institution
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