Energy, Entropy, Entropy Production LO28702

From: Heidi and Dan Chay (chay@alaska.com)
Date: 06/18/02


Replying to LO28689 --

Hi At and fellow learners,

At, I'm looking forward to your follow-up to your message responding to
the Swenson site on LMEP.

Meanwhile, you wrote:

  -- start of Dan's quote of At --
Allow me to give you a real example. Dan, you live in Alaska. Rick and
many other fellow learners live in the rest of the USA much lower. A
pipeline carries oil from Alaska to the USA where it is needed for
entropy production to sustain bifurcations. So what happens to Alaska up
north? Here is a copy of part of a report which Daan Joubert sent to me
recently.

~~~~~Begin Quote~~~
Now, in Alaska, Even the Permafrost Is Melting
By TIMOTHY EGAN

ANCHOR POINT, Alaska, June 13 - To live in Alaska when the average
temperature has risen about seven degrees over the last 30 years means
learning to cope with a landscape that can sink, catch fire or break
apart in the turn of a season.

In the village of Shishmaref, on the Chukchi Sea just south of the
Arctic Circle, it means high water eating away so many houses and
buildings that people will vote next month on moving the entire village
inland.

In Barrow, the northernmost city in North America, it means coping with
mosquitoes in a place where they once were nonexistent, and rescuing
hunters trapped on breakaway ice at a time of year when such things once
were unheard of.

>From Fairbanks to the north, where wildfires have been burning off and
on since mid-May, it means living with hydraulic jacks to keep houses
from slouching and buckling on foundations that used to be frozen all
year. Permafrost, they say, is no longer permanent.

Here on the Kenai Peninsula, a recreation wonderland a few hours' drive
from Anchorage, it means living in a four-million-acre spruce forest
that has been killed by beetles, the largest loss of trees to insects
ever recorded in North America, federal officials say. Government
scientists tied the event to rising temperatures, which allow the
beetles to reproduce at twice their normal rate.

(snip)

~~~~~~END QUOTE~~~~

I have snipped the rest because it has too much criticism on the Bush
administration which might distract the attention. The demise of nature's
organisation in Alaska is striking.

Dan, you are in a much better position to tell us more what happens
there, especially to its peoples and not merely nature.
  -- end of Dan's quote of At --

At, I live just outside of Kenai on the Kenai Peninsula. Inspired by
Andrew's creative aesthetics and as a personal monument to the
beetle-killed spruce on our property, for the last three years I slowly
have been up-rooting our dead trees one by one with a come-along to topple
them and hand trowel to loosen their roots, delimbing them and removing
their tops, then re-planting them up-side down with their root structures
in the air. <G> I have up-ended ten trees, and have another dozen along
the way.

Have you read "The Lorax," by Dr. Seuss? Loggers around here have been
pretty busy, particularly these last five years. Most of my neighbors took
advantage of a logger coming through our area offering to cut peoples'
trees in exchange for the logs. In ONE day HUGE swaths of our
neighborhood were denuded of mature coniferous trees. It was
psychologically mind-boggling for me. I visited with the friendly logger
when he approached our property.

He sat in a machine that reminded me of Dr. Seuss's "Super-Axe-Hacker." As
in, "Then...Oh! Baby! Oh! How my business did grow! Now, chopping one tree
at a time was too slow. So I quickly invented my Super-Axe-Hacker which
whacked off four Truffula Trees at one smacker. We were making Thneeds
four times as fast as before!"

My logger's machine would drive on tracks over muskeg or what-have-you. A
long articulating arm would reach out in front. At the end of the arm a
huge clamp would grasp the base of the 80-120 year-old tree. A saw at the
clamp would cut the tree off at the base and the berooted tree would be
lifted up from the base then rotated until horizontal. Then the clamp
would suck the tree trunk through it, stripping the tree of all branches
until roughly ten feet from the tip, all the while holding the 30-50 ft.
long tree horizontally in the air. At that point it would cut off the tip.
Then the machine would pivot and drop the tree to the side in a neat pile.
Then move to the next tree. The logger sat in a heated box with music and
dual controls (multiple controls on each hand grip as I recall him
explaining to me), working like a computer games player.

My logger friend said he could cut, delimb, and stack 1400 trees per day
in his machine.

The sum of fire hazard concerns, loggers wanting to capitalize quickly on
the dead spruce before they rotted, and federal subsidies (Senator
Stevens, Alaska, is a senior senator) combined to change our landscape
with roads and clear-cutting at about the same pace as the beetles, but
with about a three year lag time from the peak of beetle-kill. This is
particularly obvious from the air.

Of the many anecdotal observations I could share, let me just share three
more: one related to glaciers, one related to salmon fisheries, and one
related to oil.

I grew up near here in a mountain climbing, skiing, bush piloting,
commercial fishing kind of family. I spent a lot of time in the mountains
or flying over them. I have watched the glaciers recede around here
(northern Aleutian, southern Alaskan, and Chugach ranges). A lot.

Last month I flew as a passenger on a commercial flight from Anchorage
to Valdez and happened to sit next to a glaciologist professor from the
University of Southern California. He was quite excited as we flew over
the Columbia Glacier which calves into Prince William Sound inside the
Gulf of Alaska. He explained to me that it is receding quite fast.
Right now, he told me, it is at a bottleneck. He expects it to recede
up to 30 meters per day (!) this summer as it recedes past this
bottleneck.
...

On the northern edge of their biological range, chum salmon (Oncorhynchus
keta), have been a primary food fish of Inupiat, Yu'pik, and Athabaskan
tribes living on the Yukon and Kuskokwim rivers. Since Alaska government
agencies started counting (Alaska became a state in 1959), these rivers
often would return 3.5 - 4.5 million adult chum salmon per year. Some of
these salmon would be harvested on the Yukon nearly 2000 miles (3200
kilometers) upstream from the mouth at Teslin Lake in the Yukon Territory,
Canada.

Chum salmon are anadromous. They are born in spring in fresh water from
spawn left the autumn (more or less) before. After hatching, the alevins
move to sea, feeding along the way. They may spend most of their first
summer inshore, but start moving offshore by the fall. After feeding on
the high seas, they return to spawn after 2-7 (usually 3-5 years).

These chum salmon compete against Japanese chum salmon for copepods,
amphipods, crab larvae, etc., in the Bering Sea and the Gulf of Alaska.
This competition increased, particularly beginning in the 1980s (Japanese
economic bubble) as new Japanese hatcheries began releasing many tens of
millions of well-fed chums into the sea, largely from Hokkaido.

Since 1988, many Alaska chum stocks started declining, particularly in the
region of the Arctic, Yukon, and Kuskokwim rivers. In 1993 the Arctic,
Yukon, Kuskokwim region had an inexplicable 2.5 million fish shortfall.
Since 1993, stocks have continued to decline with many more huge
shortfalls. Villagers dependent on salmon for subsistence have continued
to survive in large part due to the largess of our federal government.
Meanwhile, there has been significant demographic movement out of the many
smaller villages to the larger villages and Anchorage and Fairbanks.

In 1997 my wife, Heidi, and I continued to run our summer commercial
salmon fishing business on the Bering Sea and the Aleutians in what often
is called the False Pass fishery, named for the village located on the
first of the Aleutian Islands, Unalaska Island, southwest of the Alaska
Peninsula.

That summer for several weeks we had a strange experience of starving
birds. For part of each season, lions mane jelly fish would proliferate
and collect on the cork line of our salmon nets. That year, gulls and the
pelagic birds, sooty shearwaters (Puffinus griseus), would hover and swim
at our cork lines, pecking at the jelly fish for a very poor diet. In a
lifetime of commercial fishing, I had never seen that before. The
shearwaters were so hungry we could occasionally scoop them up in a dipnet
and feed them parts of salmon as we held them in our hands. We had been
experiencing this for a couple weeks, when diving birds, common murres
(Uria aalge) mostly, but also pigeon guillemots (Cepphus columba), both of
whom nest along that coastline, started dying. They died by the thousands
for hundreds of miles on both sides of the Alaska Peninsula.

The most common explanation? Temperature change had driven foodstocks to
deeper water, out of the birds' diving range.

Sea lions are dying on the Southern Alaska Peninsula. Sea otters, as
well, on both sides of the Peninsula. Since then in that area, "regime
shift" has become a common term.

We fished among the Aleuts (many of whom are actually mixed
Aleut-Russian-and Scandinavian, reflecting the Caucasian historical influx
to that part of Alaska). We fished primarily for local and Bristol
Bay-returning sockeye salmon (Oncorhynchus nerka). We also caught some
chum salmon returning to the Arctic, Yukon, Kuskokwim (AYK) region. Due
primarily to the declining AYK stocks, combined with politics, a major
part of the False Pass fishery was shut down. The salmon fishery there now
is nearly dead, and we stopped fishing in 1998. Many Aleut salmon fishers
now live part or full-time in Anchorage.

My intuitive interpretation of possible connections? More or less marginal
AYK chum stocks at the northern edge of their biological range, plus
Japanese hatchery fish competition on the high seas, plus possible regime
shift dynamics ==> AYK chum fish decline, etc.. Who knows for sure?
Sureness is a difficulty when trying to understand large scale complex
changes. I could come up with other contributing factors and regional
anecdotes.

This post has become too long. Maybe I will tell you about Alaska oil
some other time.

Grins,

Dan Chay

-- 

"Heidi and Dan Chay" <chay@alaska.com>

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