Bitchin' slide shows

If you're in Kodiak, please join us for two upcoming presentations. We'll be giving a talk at the Kodiak Audubon Society meeting next month on the Southern Ocean (above). And we will also be giving a talk this Friday, Feb. 2, at the Kodiak Maritime Museum Annual Meeting. That one is also at the College, I'll add the time here when I have it.

See you there.

This Alaskan Life

Hang tough, sailing friends. The Galactics will put to sea again this boreal summer, everything going more or less to plan. We're waiting to hear the fate of a proposal that we wrote to work from the boat this summer before we decide on a destination, but I think the consensus is strong that: 1) we would all very much like to go sailing for a few months this summer; and 2) we can probably make some coin renting out the house while we're off, which sweetens the deal a bit.

After a November and December of endless rain, we've finally gotten some winter weather

Meanwhile, we're happily going about the business of being Alaskan.

We have two cords of wood stacked and waiting to go for the rest of the winter. Alisa and I just spent the week in Anchorage for the Alaska Marine Science Symposium, and we took the opportunity to go skiing there every chance we got, which was a lot. And we were greeted by snow when we returned to Kodiak, and have just clocked a two-days-of-skiing weekend, that sweet spot which is rarely experienced at the intersection of undependable low-altitude Kodiak snow and the boys' five-on, two-off schedule.

Oh yes. There was that tsunami warning as well. We were awoken by the earthquake in our hotel in Anchorage, but it was Alisa's aunt, who was watching the boys while we were away, who had to deal with the situation on the ground. The earthquake was around 1230, and the tsunami warning was for around 0145. The sirens went off and people started driving out of our neighborhood and Aunt Noe had to figure out where to go in a hurry.

There was a nice Alaskan answer to that question, in the form of our neighbor whom Alisa was able to get on the phone just as she was evacuating, and who stopped by our house to scoop up the kids and Noe to take them to a friend's house on higher ground.

Thanks, Mary. Thanks, Noe.

The boys have graduated to skiing with poles.

Please...don't need braces.

Analog Ptarmigan

All this fall and winter, whenever the weather cooperates on a weekend, Elias and I have been going ptarmigan hunting in the mountains around Kodiak.

The ptarmigan have so far avoided us. But the end goal of ptarmigan for dinner is of course an excuse for me and my oldest to get up into the hills together.

Although I dreamed of sailing the world every since my parents went to sailing school and bought the 19' Waltzing Matilda when I was 7 or so, my path to the sea very much led through the mountains of Alaska. Getting back into those mountains in the boys' company might be my greatest joy in returning to the Great Land. Up in the hills, that all seems to fall away.

Eric, so far, is not that keen on the idea of walking up mountains only to walk back down again.

Elias delights in that same idea. He is also, I have noticed, on display as a different Elias when we are in the hills together. Down in town he is navigating a lot, for an 11 year old, being suddenly cast into a world of other 11 year olds who have been raised under the remarkable range of assumptions that characterize everyday life in 21st Century America.

So it is a double delight for me, going up to the hills with him, or maybe a triple delight: being back in the hills myself, seeing them anew through Elias' eyes, and spending time with a version of my boy who is the old, calm, boy who I remember from 2016.

He is very keen to go up and spend the night in a snow cave. And, once my final proposal deadline of Feb. 15 is past, I am very keen to do that with him.

Elias at a spot that would work very well indeed for a snow cave.

There is another side to being in the hills that I love - the complete vacation it gives me from digital life.

I know it's a funny thing to complain about online, but I find the landscape of digital life to be foreign and fallacious, and I am more and more willing to turn away. You'll notice that the Facebook link on this blog came down shortly after the U.S. election.

So, the mountains are a refuge from all that. I'm sure there is an active social media world related to the mountains, but I'm also sure that it misses the point.

The view from Cope Mt. over towards Center Mt. This area has super-easy access to alpine terrain that goes on and on, and it features heavily for my thoughts for summer camping trips.

Cod and climate

This is a big deal in Kodiak.

The Pacific cod stock in the Gulf of Alaska, which supports a very important fishery, appears to more or less have collapsed. The quota is down 80% for next year.

One of the big causes of the collapse appears to be the failure of young fish to survive to adulthood. The reasons for this failure are an active area of research, by myself among many others. But the leading hypotheses at this point focus on the 2014-2017 marine heatwave. During that time, large areas of the North Pacific were warmer than had ever been observed before.

Every year, a group of scientists from the NOAA agency in America evaluates the role that climate change played in extreme climate events.

The latest report just came out. And for the first time, that group has found that some extreme events meet the strictest standards for attribution to human causes changes. Basically, there were three events in 2016 that were so extreme that they were, practically speaking, impossible in the pre-industrial climate. And one of those three events was the marine heatwave in the Gulf.

I think this is very big news for Alaska. The conditions that we're experiencing have blasted through to a state that is uniquely human-created. The livelihoods of a number of my fellow Kodiakers are being affected in as direct a way as you could imagine. So what will our collective response be?

In Australia, where I did my PhD, science denialism is much less established than in the US. As a result, adaptation to climate change is big part of the public discussion in Australia.

In the US, though, denialism is much more important, and adaptation isn't part of the political discourse at all. I'm not a sociologist, but I think this has tremendously interesting implications for that old trope about big parts of the US electorate acting against their own self-interest. Presumably farmers in the US would be up in arms about climate change? My impression is that this isn't the case.

Similarly with fishermen in Alaska. I know there is a strong conservation strain in the commercial fishing community in Alaska. But quite a number of my fishing friends are actually ex-fishermen at this point, so I don't have a real feel for the pulse of that community.

Commercial fishing is a big enough part of the Alaskan economy that fishermen speaking with a coordinated voice on any issue could wield tremendous political influence in our little state.

But, there are always the immediate problems that anyone has to deal with that inevitably dominate fishermen's attention, just like anyone else's. And the disconnect between action and payoff on slowing climate change is a big negative when any individual is considering how they might allocate their limited time and energy.

But, with the heatwave and Pacific cod, climate change has apparently become an immediate problem. I can tell you with great authority that fisheries scientists can't predict what the next climate-related surprise will be in Alaskan fisheries. But we do know with quite a bit of confidence that more surprises will be coming over future decades, and coming more and more often.

Some kind of coordinated adaptation effort, I imagine, will start to come together in coastal Alaska as a result.

Starting with this little dream...

Let's see. Since July, we've...

• Got a job.
• Bought a car.
• Bought a house.
• Watched the kids sail into school with nary a look back, and barely a hiccup along the way.

Things seem to be going just about as well as we could wish for in our re-introduction to land life after 10 years away.

True, my job has been more or less eating me alive. That will get better in time, I trust, and I hope that the University of Alaska will eventually be a great place for me to practice my science. But for this winter, I am laboriously laying the foundation for that hoped-for future.

So science demands have completely overflowed into the discretionary time that I was used to having on the boat. But more than this (hopefully temporary) time poverty that I find myself living through, I think that it's just the nature of the transition that has kept me away from this blog lately.

This was so much the place for sharing my impressions of family life afloat. Which, after all, was my life, and our life together, for these last ten years.

As our life turns into whatever shape it will take back here in Alaska, I don't think it's unreasonable to hope that I'll end up with some new sort of stories to fill these pages.

I'll make a nod towards that new beginning with these pics of the boys learning to ski.

I had a go at learning to surf when we were in Australia. It was fun, but trying to learn a new sport in my 40s mostly just left me yearning to do something I already knew how to do. Which, for me, is Nordic skiing.

I'm not a particularly good skier, but I am very comfortable on the boards, and Alisa and I got up to all kinds of long trips back in the old days, skiing for days along frozen river valleys and over mountain passes, camping each night in the snow.

And, for all these years that we were away from Alaska I had this little dream in the back of my head about how wonderful it would be to teach the boys to ski. I loved the idea of passing along this thing  that has given me so much pleasure through the years.

My parents came up to share the holiday with us, and they gave the boys skis for Christmas. A few days later we finally got some snow on the local golf course (it's been a terribly warm winter) and the whole family went out to have a go.

And well. The boys loved it, and are crazy to go as often as our paltry snow will allow. And not incidentally, they're pretty good at it to.

Mark it up as another part of life in Alaska that is suddenly that much richer for being able to share it with the boys.