Meeting deadlines and interesting people

Meeting deadlines and interesting people

The deadline has been my quietly relentless muse for the last 30 years. She used to give me headaches. But then I met her so many times that the headaches stopped.

But here's a truth - even if you've never crashed, flying by the seat of your pants is no way to execute the privilege of being heard. I have been climbing into the cockpit of that crop duster for too long.

That's why this will be my last Alaska Science Forum column. It's a 640-word science story we here at the University of Alaska Fairbanks' Geophysical Institute send for free to editors of Alaska newspapers and a few hundred readers on an email list.

Long before my arrival, in 1976, the Geophysical Institute's Neil Davis invented this public-relations soft sell. I have been writing this column since Bill Clinton was president and the Montreal Expos were hitting home runs at Olympic Park.

Early in my run, a few scientists from Norway noticed that the ice floating on the Arctic Ocean had decreased in area by 4.3 percent from 1987 to 1994. Those men thought it might be a big deal that the reflective surface some people called the refrigerator of the world was getting smaller.

Time has proven them right, as Utqiaġvik (formerly Barrow) has become the most climate-changed town in America, with temperatures more similar now to a coastal town in Norway than a fortress locked in ice.

Changes in Alaska's land, air and sea became a major theme within the million words I tapped out over the years. Recently, there have been some whoppers - among them the widespread thaw of permafrost that stains northern rivers orange and the crash of Chinook and chum salmon runs in Alaska's largest rivers.

Before we noticed those things happening, a Fairbanks miner told me, "If you want to live in a place that's not going to change, don't live in Alaska."

Like the scientists, he was right.

Change is heartbreaking (no more cutting fish with your family at your grandfather's cherished Yukon River eddy) and scary (what's the effect of Earth's atmosphere taking on all this greenhouse gas belched from ice-emancipated microbes?)

To soften the angst, I try to remember this - though we of great number are speeding ourselves toward more instability, change is the norm on this planet. We are clever and adaptable and have squeezed through bottlenecks before.

Then there's this: The law of life tells us that there are organisms out there that will benefit from a new, different state of things. Those creatures may not be us. But we've had an easy ride for a long time, including our lifetimes. I am grateful for that. With that thankfulness comes relief and - somehow - hope.

I am also grateful to Bob McCoy, now the longest-serving director of the Geophysical Institute, for continuing to sign my one-year contracts as did a few directors before him, even though I made them no money. And to all you readers, who on the coldest and darkest days emailed me supportive notes and story ideas. Your words were the air beneath the crop duster's wings.

One final thought before I paddle into the sunset of goofing off. Last August, I walked along the colossal snout of Malaspina Glacier with Paul Salopek.

Salopek is a writer for National Geographic. He and our guide Rowan Sharman hiked along sandy beaches on Salopek's shoe-leather journey around the planet, one that began 13 years ago in Africa.

As I race-walked in Xtratufs to keep up with the world walker and our 28-year-old leader, Salopek scribbled notes about the place we were, where you could travel at 3 miles per hour for a week and see a dozen bears, but not one person.

"There isn't a lot of nature left in the world," he said. "Significantly undamaged ecosystems are really rare."

As I end my career here, thanks for slogging with me through Alaska's magnificent swamps and gliding over its fields of blue-white snow.

And - one last request - picture a handsome dark-eyed junco now winging its way here from Mexico above checkerboard earth. He's not much bigger than your thumb.

That bird will soon wrap his dinosaur toes around the same green needles of the same spruce tip upon which he perched last year. In my new occupation of doing nothing, I hope to be within earshot when that junco inhales a gulp of earthy, snowmelt air and then belts out his first song of summer. Welcome to Alaska.

Since the late 1970s, the University of Alaska Fairbanks' Geophysical Institute has provided this column free in cooperation with the UAF research community. Ned Rozell is a science writer for the Geophysical Institute.