The word “angora” is also said to have come from the Turkish city Ankara. Its roots can be traced to the Greek ankylos, for “bend,” but perhaps because of its association with various animals, it came to mean “soft” in other languages.
Numerous Web sites provide summary descriptions about the processing of wool. Two examples are http://www.oldandsold.com/articles04/textiles13.shtml and http://library.thinkquest.org/C004179/wool.htm.
A more complete narrative describing World War II training intended to prepare troops for winter conditions in Japan can be found in “The Wet-Cold Clothing Team,” published in the Quartermaster Review (January–February 1946), available at http://www.qmmuseum.lee.army.mil/WWII/wet_cold.htm.
There is no concise answer to the question “What is the best fabric for outdoor use in cold environments?” Different fabrics, including the many different synthetic fabrics, have different characteristics. One fabric may be warmer than another in the absence of wind but useless when the wind blows, another may be very warm until it traps moisture, and a third may be warm but unable to withstand day-to-day use. Differences are further obscured by manufacturers’ claims, the absence of meaningful standard tests of warmth and durability, and the propensity for retail clerks to present themselves as experts. Making an informed choice about the best fabric for a parka or other winter clothing is as difficult as filing a federal tax return. Having said that, Hal Weiss’s Secrets of Warmth (1992, CloudCap, Seattle) provides useful but dated guidance.
Thousands of patent descriptions can be found online by searching for patent numbers.
Although Vilhjalmur Stefansson’s classic work The Friendly Arctic (1921, Macmillan, New York) has not been reprinted recently, copies of various old editions are available. The entire book also is available at http://books.google.com/books?id=zTvyrKu8PjwC&printsec=toc&dq =the+friendly+arctic&source=gbs_summary_r&cad=0#PPP1,M1.
Native American Niomi Panikpakuttuk’s description of clothing comes from a Northwest Territories Archives transcription of a 1996 interview (document G93-009, Northwest Territories Department of Culture and Communications, Cultural Affairs Division, Oral Traditions Contribution Program, Yellowknife, NT).
Major and minor misconceptions about the Arctic are common and extend well beyond igloos. For example, well-educated people still believe that lemmings routinely form massive herds and march over cliffs.
Diamond Jenness’s The Indians of Canada (1932, University of Toronto Press, Toronto), which has been reprinted several times, is still considered an important resource for understanding the history and culture of the native peoples of Canada. It includes chapters on hunting, dwellings, trade, social organization, religion, and other aspects of life. Jenness was born in New Zealand but spent more than thirty years trying to understand the native peoples of Canada before retiring in 1947.
For anyone passing through Fairbanks, the Cold Climate Housing Research Center is worth a visit. For information, see http://www.cchrc.org/.
APRIL
For more quotations that were misattributed to Twain, see http://www.snopes.com/quotes/twain.asp.
Robert Ettinger’s The Prospect of Immortality (1964, Doubleday, New York) was published in English, French, German, Dutch, Russian, and Italian. Who would not be intrigued by the prospect of living forever, or at least longer than a natural life span? From the cover of the Doubleday English version: “Most of us breathing now have a good chance of physical life after death — a sober, scientific probability of revival and rejuvenation of our frozen bodies.”
The brownish pages of a mimeographed copy of the cryonics manual have been scanned and made available at http://www.lifepact.com/mm/mrm000.htm by Fred and Linda Chamberlain, life members of the Cryonics Institute. In their introductory page, the authors describe the manual: “Notwithstanding this failure to ‘get off the ground,’ in the attempt to be comprehensive, a great number of topics were addressed, at least in a preliminary way.” Although it may be easy to make light of cryonics, one can secretly hope that the Chamberlains and other believers will have the last laugh.
Roald Amundsen’s The South Pole: An Account of the Norwegian Expedition in the Fram, 1910–1912 was republished by White Star Publishers (Vercelli, Italy) in 2007 as Race to the South Pole. Electronic versions of the original are available at books.google.com.
The quotation about potholes from the Washington State official came from “Recent Storms Leave Lasting Effects for Seattle Drivers,” an article by Tiffany Wan in The Daily of the University of Washington (January 24, 2007). The quotation about potholes from a Michigan spokesman came from “Road Workers Scramble to Fix Winter’s Damage,” an article by Andy Henion in the Detroit News (March 13, 2007).
According to the Smart Road Web site ( http://www.virginiadot.org/projects/constsal-smartrdoverview.asp), a 5.7-mile stretch of the heavily engineered and instrumented Smart Road between Interstate 81 and Blacksburg, Virginia, will eventually open to the public.
Earl Brown’s Alcan Trailblazers: Alaska Highway’s Forgotten Heroes (2005, Autumn Images, Fort Nelson, BC) is one of several books available on the history of the Alcan. Alcan Trailblazers relies in part on diary entries and letters written by construction workers. An interesting history with photographs can be found at http://web.mst.edu/~rogersda/umrcourses/ge342/Alcan%20Highway-revised.pdf. An American Experience documentary, “Building the Alaska Highway” (PBS), also presents the history of the road.
At least one document held by the Alaska State Libraries Historical Collections suggests that there was some interest in attempting to maintain the Hickel Highway (Alaska Department of Highway Photograph Collection, Walter Hickel [“Haul Road”] Construction, 1968–1969, PCA 82). Today many Alaskans, especially those working on the North Slope, refer to the Dalton Highway (the existing paved road between Fairbanks and Deadhorse that leads to the North Slope oil fields) as the Haul Road, not knowing that the Hickel Highway was also called the Haul Road. The routes for the two roads were not the same. Surprisingly few Alaskans have heard of the short-lived Hickel Highway.
Anchorage, although it is a relatively small city surrounded by undeveloped land and the sea, has had difficulties meeting federal clean air standards. For a full description of the situation, see “Clean Air Act Reclassification; Anchorage, Alaska, Carbon Monoxide Nonattainment Area” (December 2, 1997, Federal Register, vol. 62, no. 231).
Richard Byrd’s experience with chronic carbon monoxide poisoning during his solo adventure in Antarctica is described in the August chapter. In his circumstances, levels could easily have risen to a point at which death was inevitable.
My house was flooded by a broken pipe while I was away overnight. When I returned, a distressing stream of water was flowing under the garage door, and the water in the downstairs rooms was ankle-deep.
Independence Mine State Historical Park is open to the public during the summer. Many of the mining buildings have been restored. Although visitors can walk around the grounds and hike into the surrounding mountains, none of the tunnels is open to visitors.
MAY
Although it seems unlikely that anyone can say for certain, most specialists seem to think that the carrying capacity of the Arctic steppe would have been somewhat less than that of temperate and tropical large-mammal havens today, such as the Serengeti.
Dan O’Neill’s The Last Giant of Beringia: The Mystery of the Bering Land Bridge (2004, Basic Books, New York) tells the story of the scientific investigation of Beringia, focusing mainly on work by Dave Hopkins.
Postglacial rebound, also called continental rebound, isostatic rebound, isostatic adjustment, and isostatic recovery, is complex. As glaciers and ice sheets melt, land rises quickly in what is sometimes called elastic rebound. Later, the rate of rise decreases exponentially. Rebound rates today may be one inch every two or three years — difficult to measure but nevertheless rapid by geological standards. Rebound rates are measured using various methods, including surveying methods that rely o
n sophisticated GPS networks.
Evelyn C. Pielou’s After the Ice Age: The Return of Life to Glaciated North America (1991, University of Chicago Press, Chicago) gives a much more detailed and technical account of many of the events associated with the end of the last period of extensive glaciation.
Kettle lakes are common in Alaska and throughout the north, but they are often mixed with other lake types, such as thaw lakes and oxbow lakes.
Plant and animal ranges continue to change, with the plants’ and animals’ entry into new areas assisted and accelerated by human corridors. For example, roads provide disturbed ground that allows certain plants to set seed with limited competition from long-established species that occupy most of the ground in undisturbed areas. Similarly, roads provide paths for animal movement. Radio-collared animals, such as wolves and caribou, often follow roads.
The first site where Clovis artifacts were found and the nearby Black-water Draw Museum can be visited just outside Portales, New Mexico. When the Blackwater Draw Site was found during highway construction in 1932, bones were displayed in a Portales store as a curiosity. Edgar Howard, an archaeologist who was intrigued when he was presented with a fluted spear point by a resident of Clovis, New Mexico, excavated the site from 1932 to 1936 and referred to it as “the Clovis Site.” (It was renamed the Blackwater Draw Site by E. H. Sellards many years later.) No human remains were discovered, but a number of stone and bone tools were found, along with bones from mammoths, shovel-toothed mastodons, ancient bison, horses (species that predated the Spanish introduction of European horses to North America), tapirs, camels, llamas, dire wolves, ground sloths, short-faced bears, and saber-toothed tigers.
The scientists interviewed for the newspaper article about their paper on mosquito evolution were Christina Holzapfel and William Bradshaw, both of the University of Oregon. The two scientists published the article “Evolutionary Response to Rapid Climate Change” in the prestigious academic journal Science (June 9, 2006, vol. 312, pp. 1477–78). Among other things, the Science article said, “Studies show that over the recent decades, climate change has led to heritable genetic changes in populations as diverse as birds, squirrels, and mosquitoes.” However, the authors also point out that an ability to evolve in response to rapid climate change “does not, in itself, ensure that a population will survive.”
Richard Stone’s Mammoth: The Resurrection of an Ice Age Giant (2001, Perseus Publishing, Cambridge, MA) offers a thorough and readable history of the recovery of mammoth bones and frozen carcasses. Stone to some degree highlights investigations into the possible rebirth of the mammoth through the use of cloning technology applied to tissue samples recovered from permafrost.
The quotation from Eugene Pfizenmayer, one of the scientists sent by the Russian Imperial Academy of Science to retrieve the frozen mammoth carcass from the bank of the Berezovka River in 1901–1902, comes from Pfizenmayer’s Siberian Man and Mammoth (1939, Blackie and Son, London). This book describes both the reality of digging up mammoth remains and the rigors of traveling and living in Siberia in the early part of the twentieth century. Pfizenmayer’s trip provides a contrast to Bering’s trip across Siberia two hundred years earlier.
The Discovery Channel produced two documentaries about the Jarkov mammoth, Raising the Mammoth (2000) and Land of the Mammoth (2000).
A well-known North Slope wildlife biologist also commented on the freezer-burned taste of preserved meat during a public radio interview after tasting centuries-old frozen whale meat discovered in a long-abandoned ice cellar.
Northstar Island, also known as Seal Island, is a man-made gravel island in water about thirty feet deep six miles north of Prudhoe Bay.
Elisha Kent Kane described the expedition in Arctic Explorations: The Second Grinnell Expedition in Search of Sir John Franklin, 1853, 54, 55 (reprint, 1996, Lakeside Press, Chicago). Kane provides yet another account of the fortitude required to survive multiyear strandings in the Arctic. Without intending to do so, he also looks somewhat foolish in his inability to learn from the local people who lived near his stranded vessel. Greely carried Kane’s writings, among others, on his disastrous expedition in 1881.
The 1984 expedition to find the remains of Sir John Franklin and his crew is described in Owen Beattie and John Geiger’s Frozen in Time: Unlocking the Secrets of the Doomed 1845 Arctic Expedition (1990, Plume Printing, New York). The book includes color photographs of the disinterred bodies of Petty Officer John Torrington and Able Seaman John Hartnell, both dead and frozen for more than a century but looking as if they could have been buried less than a week.
Brenda Fowler’s Iceman: Uncovering the Life and Times of a Prehistoric Man Found in an Alpine Glacier (2001, University of Chicago Press, Chicago) provides a detailed account of the Iceman’s discovery and exhumation, including the political machinations of various parties interested in this unusual find.
On October 15, 2004, Helmut Simon, one of the hikers who had discovered the Iceman, set out from Bad Hofgastein in Salzburg, Austria, on what should have been a four-hour hike. He did not return as planned. More than eighteen inches of snow had fallen. Simon died in the snow and cold of the mountains, just as the Iceman had thousands of years earlier.
Airman Leo Mustonen’s story was told in dozens of newspapers, from Hawaii to Florida, suggesting the human-interest appeal of frozen human remains.
The museum housing the Iceman is in Bolzano, Italy. The Iceman’s frozen carcass can be observed through a small window.
The dryas — specifically, Dryas octopetala, also called mountain avens — gave its name to two cold periods, or stadials, that occurred after the last glacial period of the Pleistocene Ice Age. The Younger Dryas, sometimes called the Big Freeze, lasted about thirteen hundred years, starting about thirteen thousand years ago. The Older Dryas lasted only a few hundred years, starting about fourteen thousand years ago. Stadials such as these (and the Little Ice Age) remind us of the variability of climate, but this variability should not be confused with the kind of variability that is occurring now, which appears to be much more significant and linked to greenhouse gas emissions.
JUNE
According to the Environmental Protection Agency, burning a gallon of gasoline releases almost twenty pounds of carbon dioxide. Many carbon footprint calculators are available on the Internet. The carbon footprint of even environmentally conscious people is shocking. No one would willingly and knowingly dump ten or twenty pounds (or more) of garbage from their car during the daily commute to and from work, yet that is exactly what most people do every day.
Joseph Fourier’s 1827 essay “Mémoire sur les températures du globe terrestre et des espaces planétaires” (“Report on the Temperature of the Earth and Planetary Spaces,” Mémoires de l’Académie Royale des Sciences, vol. 7, pp. 569–604) is often cited as the first description of the greenhouse effect. To some degree, it appears to be a rehashing or refinement of Fourier’s 1824 paper “Remarques générales sur les températures du globe terrestre et des espaces planétaires” (“Remarks on the Temperature of the Earth and Planetary Spaces,” Annales de Chemie et de Physique, vol. 27, pp. 136–67). His papers have to be read in the context of the times. One would not expect someone working in 1827 to have even a rudimentary understanding of the current knowledge of heat exchange and atmospheric physics, so readers should not expect Fourier’s papers to offer any more than a hint of the truth as we understand it today.
Guy Callendar’s first paper on climate change and carbon dioxide seems to have been “The Artificial Production of Carbon Dioxide and Its Influence on Temperature” (1938, Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society, vol. 64, pp. 223–37).
Carbon dioxide dissolved in water is an acid. The impact of ocean acidification is only beginning to be understood, but it may turn out that acidification equals or exceeds climate change in its ability to disrupt ecosystems and affect the lives of humans.
A paper by Roger Revelle and Hans Suess titled “C
arbon Dioxide Exchange Between Atmosphere and Ocean and the Question of an Increase of Atmospheric CO2 During the Past Decades” (1957, Tellus, vol. 9, pp. 18–27) is often considered to be an especially significant paper in the development of current thinking about climate change.
On May 15, 2008, the polar bear was listed as “threatened” under the Endangered Species Act. The listing was driven primarily by loss of sea ice habitat. Under the act, a species is considered “endangered” if it is at risk of extinction in all or a substantial portion of its natural range in the foreseeable future and “threatened” if it is at risk of becoming “endangered” in the foreseeable future.
Bob Carter was quoted in the Canada Free Press in a June 12, 2006, article called “Scientists Respond to Gore’s Warnings of Climate Catastrophe.” The article goes on to say that most of Gore’s climate change supporters are not climate change experts and that many climate change experts are not strong supporters of predictions of widespread and rapid climate change. Predictably, Carter was promptly attacked from some quarters and praised from others.
The quotation from Richard Lindzen comes from an August 1, 2006, article by Lindzen. The article was published by the Heartland Institute in Environment and Climate News under the title “No Climate Change.” Lindzen describes Gore’s vision as “shrill alarmism.” Lindzen is widely cited for challenging claims of a “consensus” among scientists regarding climate change.
The Patrick Michaels quotation comes from a June 21, 2005, article by Ker Than called “How Global Warming Is Changing the Animal Kingdom” in Live Science. Michaels does not argue against climate change but rather points out that not every change in animal and plant communities is linked to or caused by climate change. “It’s not all a result of human induced climate change,” he is quoted as saying. “Half of it is at best, probably less than half.”
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