Jewish populations showed a high level of genetic similarity to each other, clustering together in several types of analysis of population structure. Further, Bayesian clustering, neighbor-joining trees, and multidimensional scaling place the Jewish populations as intermediate between the non-Jewish Middle Eastern and European populations.

These results support the view that the Jewish populations largely

share a common Middle Eastern ancestry and that over their history they have undergone varying degrees of admixture with non-Jewish populations of European descent.

In other words, a shared ancestry. A peoplehood.

But here were two surprises in the study, published in BMC Genetics. One, although most Ashkenazim come from the northern part of Europe, most of the European genes come from southern Europe–Italy, Greece, Sardinia. One guess is that most of the intermarriages and assimilation happened after the Jews dispersed from the Middle East during the years of the Roman Empire, at least more so than in later years when they wound up in Germany and Poland during the Middle Ages. Then, they generally were sequestered in ghettos and in villages or parts of cities and had limited interaction with surrounding populations until the beginning of the 19^th century.

And the second surprise is that the group of people closest genetically to the Jews are Palestinians. Both come from the Levant area and Mesopotamia. That could be that many Palestinians are likely of original Jewish or Samaritan origin.

Combatants in the Middle East might note.

[OK, the photo is Dominique Sanda and friend in "The Garden of the Finzi-Continis," about an Italian-Jewish family in WW2. Seems appropriate. You'd rather see Khazars?]

Post Office, Newtok, AK

Joseph Patrick, 64, believes in retrospect, the villagers knew something was wrong back in the 1950s right after the Yup’ik moved into the new site, but it wasn’t until twenty years later they realized their world was turning upside down. Patrick is one of the Newtok elders, and if you travel to the village, the community insists you speak to them for they hold the wisdom of the place. They remember back in the day, before Newtok was doomed.

Until the 1950s, this community was located on higher ground, a place called Old Kealavic, about ten miles from the current location, where they lived in sod dwellings, half buried in the tundra. The students in the Old Kealavic community traveled to Bethel, St. Mary’s, Sitka or Anchorage for education, but in 1958, the Bureau of Indian Affairs decided that all Alaskan natives needed schools. Most of Alaska’s Eskimos and Indians found themselves settled into villages, usually beyond the state’s road system, villages built around their schools. These Yup’ik were moved from Old Kealavic to a new site. They called the new settlement Newtok.

The elders of Newtok

The two men sat in a lounge in a newest Newtok school while the school’s young principle, Grant Kashatok, translated from the Yup’ik. The river then was frozen farther out, they said, and the mouth of the river, where it spilled into the sea, was colder then. Gradually it became shallower, the water became warmer and eventually the shoreline began moving further out. That means they soon found they had to travel farther to fish and hunt. Every year, it seemed, it got worse.

“We don’t have an ocean to go down to when we go hunting now,” Michael John, 71, said.

While the sea was retreating, the river was coming closer, and the permafrost beneath the town (permafrost that underlies most of Alaska) was melting right under them. They decided a decade ago, it was time to look for a place to move the settlement again.

A group of elders explored the area around the village to see if they could find a place. They preferred “old sites,” places where the Yup’ik had lived before to see if they could return, but the old sites were sinking too. The elders had no trouble finding the sites. Because of erosion, the old bodies in the cemeteries were exposed on the surfaceAccess to most of the villages of the Yukon-Kuskokwim delta in western Alaska is through Bethel, a frontier town of 7,000 on the Kuskokwim River. It is a bustling if cluttered port town, the economic base for the huge delta region. The area’s hospital is here, so is the administrative center for the native corporations. Hunters and fishers use it as a base–the delta is rich in wildlife, although part of it is a wildlife preserve. Mostly Bethel is a victim of its location.

Bethel has six miles of paved road that connect to nothing. The cars have no place to go once they get to Bethel by air or barge and never get to exceed fifty miles an hour.

Like all Alaskan communities, including parts of Anchorage and Fairbanks, the custom of dumping your junk on the lawns or in the driveways prevails. I was told the reason Alaskans rarely throw anything out is that it is so expensive to bring in and because you never know when you need a spare part. Also, there is no real place to put it. Central dumps are not universally supported, in part because the ground is usually frozen. The result is an Arctic Appalachian culture, with old cars, couches, refrigerators, snowmobiles, animal skins and bones everywhere, particularly in front or back yards.

While Bethel is served by Alaska Airlines 737s from Anchorage, flights to the villages are organized by two competing bush airlines using single-engine planes. Airport security at Bethel is a throwback to the pre-9/11 days and even ticketing is informal. The pilot meets you at the doorway, collects your ticket, escorts you to the plane, helps load the baggage (you have to tell him your weight) and helps you into the aircraft. No one gets searched.

One day in May, one of my students, Amy Chaussé, and I flew across the tundra through snow squalls at between 400 and 700 feet, a thrilling, smooth and beautiful ride in a Cessna 208. Like most bush planes, the Cessna had half its sixteen seats removed for freight, the planes being the only way of getting mail and goods to the villages until the river ice melts, which doesn’t happen until late May, early June. I got to sit in the copilot’s seat. While some of the thousands of lakes and ponds were still frozen, the tundra grass was visible everywhere with only a hem of snow in pockets and in the shallow ridges. Now and again, the ground would be obscured by another squall, but the air stayed smooth. Occasionally an airstrip and a few houses would appear, another village, and ninety-four miles from Bethel, the village of Newtok. Flying in Alaska is statistically the most dangerous aviation in the world, but this flight was a joy.

Newtok sits on the north bank of the Ninglick River, one of the countless tributaries of the mighty Yukon, one of the world’s great rivers, which runs 2,000 miles from western Canada, up through interior Alaska, past the Arctic Circle and down toward the Bering Sea, eventually spreading like a coral fan across the vast tundra. There is no one mouth to the Yukon, but hundreds of outlets through the arteries and veins of the delta and the Ninglick is one. A second tributary, the Kealavik (also called the Newtok) once ran on the east side of the town, but years ago, it cut a new path, a shortcut to the Ninglick, bypassing the village.

The weather at Newtok is not awful by interior Alaskan standards, with maximum highs in the summer at fifty-six to sixty degrees Fahrenheit, and lows in the winter at eighteen to nineteen above zero. It has gotten as warm as eighty and as cold as negative thirty-five, but those are the extremes. Newtok gets better than two feet of snow every year. Freeze-up begins in early November on the rivers, late November on the Bering Sea, fifteen miles away. The ice on the river can be six to eight feet thick. Breakup is in May. The permafrost is not uniform, which accounts for the little puddles and ponds in the tundra, but at its thickest, it can go 600 feet down.

In Yup’ik tradition, houses should be round, but in Newtok the only thing round is the light blue tank holding the diesel fuel for the generators. The shacks sit on stilts to keep them off the permafrost. Electric cables run everywhere. Wooden planks serve as walkways. There being no vehicles except snow machines and ATVs, there is no need for streets.

Newtok in early spring

The people of Newtok are members of the Central Alaskan Yup’ikgroup who populate the central coast of Western Alaska, across the sea from their cousins in Siberia. The Yup’ik have been there for about 2,000 years, and the Newtok Yup’ik share a heritage with Yup’ik on Nelson Island across the river. Collectively, they are known as Qaluyaarmiut, the dip net people, for the way they fish. Eskimos are generally collected as language groups, not tribes, and the Yup’ik are the largest, about 20,000 souls.  Their first contact with Europeans was in the 1840s, when a Russian explorer, Lt. Lavrenty Zagoskin, of the Russian America Company, came through while surveying the delta. An occasional missionary visited and converted a few Yup’iks from their animist religion since, but they were something of a moving target, nomadic most of the year. The Eskimos spent spring and summer at hunting camps following the caribou and marine mammals, and then collected in settlements to pass the winter. As late as the 1960s, they would pack their belongings on dogsleds and gather at the banks of the Ninglick. They survived then–and to less extent now–harvesting fish and mammals from the sea, particularly seals and walruses. Like most natives, they gave up dogsleds decades ago in favor of gas-driven ATVs and snow machines.

Most Yup’ik in the community that became Newtok were almost completely isolated from the rest of the world until the 1920s, in part because the nearest road is eighty miles away. Then Alaska formed the Territorial Guard (now the Alaska National Guard) and men from the community began to see more of the outside world and the isolation ended.

The exact population depends on who you ask. Officially the census says are 353 people in Newtok, but the locals say there are about a hundred more. In the spring of 2008, the number was listed by authorities at 467. According to the 2000 census, there were eighty-seven housing units with four buildings empty. There are fewer buildings now. Except for young school teachers brought in from outside, the population is entirely Yup’ik. More than half the population was not in the workforce at the time of the census, and the median household income was $32,188. Things have not changed much since. There is a health clinic–sometimes staffed by a nurse–but for anything serious people are flown to Bethel or Anchorage. Drinking water comes from a nearby lake and goes into a water treatment plant. In the winter, melted ice provides the water. There is no sewage system; Newtok is a “honey bucket” community.

At least 180 Eskimo villages now are threatened by climate change and six of them–Shishmaref, Shaktoolik, Unalakleet, Koyukuk, Kivalina and Newtok–have only a few more years to live. In some cases, the Army Corps of Engineers has recommended Dutch-style sea walls to keep the villages from being washed away. In the case of three towns, Newtok, Kivalina and Shishmaref, the only salvation is to pick them up and move them. That is stunningly expensive and the political will to produce the money is not there. No one believes they will be the only towns that will confront this conundrum. Things are going to get much worse.

Alaska as more than 30,000 miles of coastline, and 80 percent of its population lives on the coast. The sea is rising, the storms are howling. Shishmaref and Kivalina, are getting blown away. Last year the 300 residents of Kivalina had to be evacuated because of an impending storm. Authorities were afraid the wind would knock over the diesel fuel tank and spread toxic liquid over the settlement. Newtok is victimized by both erosion and melting permafrost and living there has become untenable.

The troubles of Newtok can be seen on the wooden planking, which was fairly flat and straight when it was laid down but now dips and weaves between the buildings. By May, the predominant feature of the village is mud as the top level of soil, only inches thin above the permafrost and frozen through the winter, melts. One result of mud, the poverty and the culture, is filth. The sole exception is the new school, built in modular form ten years ago, the center of Newtok’s universe. It could be plopped in any upper-class suburban American community and be appreciated. Thanks to oil and gas royalties, most of the newer schools in Alaska are physically exceptional, often beautiful and usually well-equipped. Newtok’s school is no exception, a haven in the mire. It also is jammed. In a town of around 400, there are 120 children in the school, from kindergarten to twelfth grade, all sharing the same facilities.

The school library (the only library in the village) is tiny, and the book selection odd: a great deal of fantasy and science fiction, sports books, a few classics, and several complete collections of Harry Potter. Even the shelving is idiosyncratic, with the Ultimate Baseball Book (a sport absolutely impossible to play on tundra) next to Using Maps and Globes and The Mystery of Stonehenge; a biography of every professional sports team sits next to books on teenage suicide (not irrelevant in village communities), and a history of the Crow Indians next to Robert Ballard’s book on the Titanic. Almost all the books are in English. The Yup’ik have a written language, designed for them by Moravian missionaries from Pennsylvania in the nineteenth century, but it is clumsy and archaic and in the 1960s, Irene Reed at the University of Alaska designed the newer, more modern one used now. Some of the books in the school library have the Moravian script on one side, the Reed script on the other because many of the older people predate Dr. Reed. As in most Alaskan villages, the children were forbidden to speak their native language in school but that changed years ago. The first two years of school are in Yup’ik (and the teachers Eskimo) and then they switch to English.

The village school, K-12 in Newtok

Like most Alaskan villages, Newtok and its school are well-connected by satellite to the rest of the world. Satellite dishes connect computers in the tribal office and the school to the Internet, and the village’s administrative offices are computerized. One schoolroom contains several dozen white Apple Macbooks.

In the schools, children are encouraged to learn a trade such as plumbing, carpentry or an electrical vocation in hopes of bringing the skill and knowledge back to the village. The school is likely the largest employer in Newtok.

Many of the people have phone service and many of the homes get a cable connection to the satellite feeds. If you ask the Newtok inhabitants what they do in their spare time, they will tell you they watch movies.

Heidi Post, a non-Eskimo school teacher from Michigan, in Newtok for the last two years, thought Newtok was “gross” and “disgusting” when she came for the first time, she told Amy Chaussé. But she stayed and is now part of the community, engaged to a young Yup’ik man. Her initial reaction is hardly unreasonable. Skinned fish hang from wooden posts on top of shack homes, floors are smeared with blood and guts from baby seals that are cut up in the middle of the small dwellings. She would try to teach her students about sanitation and cleanliness but was informed that they don’t get sick. She’s a kasaq (pronounced gussuk) which means white person, and only kasaqs get sick, she was told. That is patently untrue. Indeed, Alaska is the only state requiring children to get hepatitis B vaccine before they can enter school because of disease in honey bucket homes and towns. For all practical purposes, the Eskimo villages of America’s Alaska are the Third World. The villagers have high rates of lung and skin infections, largely because there are no sewage systems. While 99.4 percent of American homes have indoor plumbing, only two-thirds of the Alaskan villages do. It costs as much as $50,000 to add plumbing to a house because the pipes can’t be easily buried in the permafrost–yet–and even in oil-rich Alaska, that’s expensive. Moreover, the pipes are prone to freeze. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), children in these villages were hospitalized for pneumonia eleven times as often as the national average. The rate of gastrointestinal disease was not much higher, however, because there is access to clean drinking water; it was the water used to wash that carried pathogens. The school principal reminds the children to wipe their feet before they enter their own homes and urge their parents to occasionally mop the floor of their homes with bleach. Post says they don’t bother because the next day the women are preparing food again, which often involves dismembering a marine mammal.

Although there is no normal plumbing in Newtok, the faucets in the school produce water. You are told not to drink it because of E-coli, and there are water distilleries by every fountain and sink in the school. The toilets flush and the showers drain, with everything flowing to the main open sewer lagoon a few hundred feet from the school. The lagoon is largely contained by permafrost, which is, of course, melting. You can’t flush toilet paper because it will clog up the pipes. In many Eskimo communities, soiled toilet paper is put in plastic bags and thrown out with the rest of the garbage, a habit some of the people take with them if they move into the cities. The lagoon is where the village’s waste is dumped. Post says there is a huge dump for garbage that is burned a few times in the summer when it is dry but the villager’s do not go out there often, which is evident from trash from soda cans and diapers littered in the muck.

There is a central laundry facility.

The lights stay on in the school 24/7 so the pipes do not freeze and if the generator turns off it may not come on again. The school acts as hotel for visitors. For a small fee, you camp out on mattresses on the floor. Just call in advance. There is a full kitchen and food can be obtained from either of two small stores.

Post describes how the children love the school because it is so clean and she will sometimes “threaten” disobedient children with sending them home.

The school has a large budget to transport its sport teams to neighboring villages, usually by plane or by snow machines. Moving around is easier in the winter when everything is frozen solid and you can use ice roads. Traveling to other towns is how young people meet, date and get married. Post says relationships between young people within the town are discouraged. The elders will intervene if they witness a couple getting too close, she said. The elders will pull the young ones aside and tell them “No, you are brother and sister and must not date.” Post explains that “brother and sister” isn’t literal but in the Yup’ik sense, meaning the entire village is one big family (and they are most likely all blood related). Sociologists who have studied the Eskimo communities don’t believe a word of it. The winters are very long and very dark and there is not very much to do. The men of the village take turns being police, and occasionally, an Alaska State Trooper will fly in, but mostly it is a safe, peaceful town.

Yup'ik child

Post is fond of the children of Newtok and loves her job. Eskimo children, boys and girls, are irresistible, black eyes and hair and honey-colored skin, round faces that seem most natural when grinning. They are decidedly not shy around strangers. It was impossible for Chaussé or me to move anywhere in Newtok without a cloud of children surrounding us. Chaussé bought candy, which made us particularly welcome, but the children wouldn’t think of begging. They were simply enjoying having company.

The school season just ended when Chaussé and I visited, and Post was off for the summer, returning to her mother’s home with her Yup’ik fiance, George Charles. She wore an ivory carved ring on her finger. She will soon become part of the one big family in Newtok.

☀

The river keeps eating away at the land, creeping closer and closer to the buildings. Newtok is below sea level. The ice that normally protected the village from storms is melting, and the storms have been far more savage than the village elders remember, with winds sometimes reaching hurricane velocity.

The community center is the one building in Newtok that most reflects the village’s plight. It’s popular with teenagers and older people who play bingo at night, but the floor is buckled and wavy as the permafrost beneath it melts. During spring, you will see the locals scooping out water while playing their game. There is no playground for young kids, only the school gym. There isn’t a safe place to put a playground because the equipment will just sink in the thawing permafrost, so the youngest kids play in the gym and out in front of the school, a few yards from the sewer lagoon.  The wooden houses have to be lifted or adjusted regularly to compensate for the softening ground. The community center will not get fixed.

According to Orson Smith of the University of Alaska Anchorage, the erosion at Newtok is the result of storm surges, usually caused by the wind. The winds do not have to be particularly strong, just persistent and blowing over long lengths of ocean, something called “fetch.” That wind also blows waves against the shore, in Newtok’s case, from both rivers. The convergence of the Ninglick and the Kealavik made matters worse, changing the angle of the tides. The angle of the wind is important: obviously it has to be blowing toward the land, and of course, the closer to the perpendicular, the worst the effect on the coastline. Normally, sediment is carried away from the shoreline in the winter, and the shoreline gets to rebuild in the calmer summer when the process is reversed. Because of the climate changes, however, that rebuilding does not come close to replacing what the winter washes away in coastal Alaska, Smith says. In many areas, the storms clobber the edge of frozen ground, which resists the battering, and the waves undercut cliffs and bluffs. Buildings are toppling in Shishamef as the low cliffs collapse. When permafrost melts, the land subsides, making it an easier target for the waves.

Like for much of Alaska, good data are nonexistent or ambiguous so no one knows exactly how high the water gets when the area floods, only that it has gotten much worse in the last ten years. It now floods regularly twice a year. In 2005, Newtok was completely inundated. The more erosion, the easier it is for storm surges to hit the town.

The easiest way to avoid this tidal disaster is to get out of its way, which is what the people of Newtok would love to do.

The plight of the village reached a crisis stage when the barge landing on the Ninglick was declared unsafe and Newtok could no longer get summer supplies up the river from the Bering Sea–including diesel fuel to run the generators. Now everything must be flown in and that’s expensive.

“We got suspended from Northland Services [the barge company] because we lost our barge landing,” says Stanley Tom, who has risen to be the community organizer of Newtok. “No landing whatsoever…. It eroded away. It was a solid foundation and the barge companies cannot land. This is tundra, permafrost and it’s just going to sink down. If you leave material on the beach and if there is a south wind, it’s going to erode away and fall off.”

Fortunately for Newtok, they have Tom, forty-seven, father of nine (with a grandson and adopted niece living with him). He is a master at public relations and working the bureaucracy, and almost everyone in Alaska agrees that Newtok is likely to be one of the first town moved–if any town gets moved–and it will be Tom’s victory. “I have sleepless nights,” he says. “After the work, I’m like thinking. I really want my village to have a good clean village.”

Besides running his family’s small general store, Tom is the town’s administrator. He has acquired an astounding collection of documents in his battle, some outgoing to state and federal officials, and some incoming from the same. They cram filing cabinets and computer disks in his offices.

He is not a native to Newtok. He was born in the nearby village of Tununak, but his family traveled between the two villages, and he finally settled in Newtok as a teenager. He was named mayor at the age of twenty-four and has been

reasonably in control of the village since then, even after the elders dissolved the village government and decided to govern by traditional rules.

Everyone agrees that Newtok is lost. Tom says that creates two issues. One, where the town should go, and two, and the more difficult question, is who is going to pay for the move. The first question has probably been answered; the second question isn’t close to an answer because no one wants to pay for it.

At first, the elders could not agree among six possible sites. That got whittled down to three by authorities but Tom and the villagers selected a fourth, nine miles away and across the river on Nelson Island. The site has the advantage of being on the south bank of the river, away from the thrust of the erosion. The new village will be called Mertarvik. Other Yup’ik who already live on the island don’t object to their neighbors moving closer.

Stanley Tom

The state Department of Transportation, is building a barge landing near Mertarvik, Tom says. All the other sites were too rocky and too high. The fact they can put the landing there is a de facto concession for the location, he says. The reconnaissance for the new runway has been completed and a well for water has been drilled.

“We are moving. There is no way of stopping us,” he says. “This winter they are going to bring in equipment to build roads near a quarry so they can test the rocks.”

☀

Not so fast.

According to the Corps of Engineers, there are sixty-three houses now in Newtok and twenty-two of them are moveable. The other forty-one will fall apart if anyone tries to pry them loose and carry them off. The Corps would have to barge in cranes, lift the houses off their foundations, swing them on to the barges, ferry them across the river and repeat the process. The Corps estimates that it would cost $400,000 to move each house, a figure Tom believes is “grossly overestimated.”

“I criticized the Corps of Engineers. I don’t know how they came up with such numbers,” he says. He thinks the houses can be moved over the river by barge in the summer, over the ice in the winter, which would be cheaper. But that is only part of the cost, he acknowledges. What about the people whose houses can’t be moved? Someone will have to build new homes for them.

In the meantime, he says, this would be a good time to improve the living standards of the community.

“We’re addicted to western civilization, electricity. We’re addicted to these easy things right now,” he says. “We own our own power company–diesel. At the new site, the Denali Commission will build us a new tank farm. Everything will be new. Water-sewer will be built and we got a proposal for about $1 million. We want an underground sewer system.” An underground sewer system will mean drilling and digging through the permafrost which, despite recent melting, remains a formidable barrier.

Bits and pieces of the move have been arranged and funding acquired, but that only begins to account for the cost. The Corps estimated that the price for moving the 457 people and infrastructure of the village of Newtok to the island would run $100 million. Critics point out–correctly–they could buy every family in Newtok a condo in Hawaii for less. The Yup’ik do not want to move to Hawaii. They want to stay on the Yukon River delta and be Eskimos. Moving Kivalina and Shismaref could be double the cost because they are on barrier islands in the Bering and would have farther to go. An alternative would be to move the Eskimos into predominantly white cities like Fairbanks or Anchorage, but then that would endanger their culture.

Even Alaska’s infamous “earmark” squad in Washington is having trouble helping  the villages. The master of extracting federal funding, Sen. Ted Stevens (R-AK)  lost his reelection after being indicted, the state’s sole Representative was in trouble, leaving Newtok at the mercy of bureaucrats.

That creates a whole new level of complexity, complications that will plague Shishmaref and Kivilina and every other village threatened by the new climate.

“People don’t understand this process. They think it is federally full-funded expense,” Tom says. “It’s not. Both federal and state agencies will be involved. For example, the school. The school will be moved by the school district.

Roads within the community. It could be federal or state agencies and planning by the Alaska Department of Transportation. The tank farm will be coming from the Denali Commission. They want to combine all the tank farms–school and village–into one tank farm. We also want to build a wind generator.

“I’m not going to wait for any federal, state agencies. They are not going to help me unless I do my work. That’s how the system works. If you don’t do any work the agencies will just sit down and wait. They are not going to move us; you have to do it from your own efforts.”

The new barge site alone cost $1 million, $800.000 in federal money, $200,000 from the state.

The conservative short-term estimate of the cost of climate change for the state: $10 billion. Not everyone is pleased to be spending the money, and Tom’s fight has only begun.

And if moving Newtok is going to be difficult and expensive, think about the barrier islands off North Carolina or Texas or the coast of Florida. Galveston? New Orleans? Miami?

because septic tanks have to be drained regularly and that requires both competence

and luck. One or the other ran out, and the tank and the toilet in hut 171 backed up. The

mess has been cleaned up, but the aroma lingers. Where else would you put four graduate students and an unproductive journalist? We are at the Barrow Arctic Science Consortium(BASC), the Iñupiat corporation-run science center that does research on the Arctic Ocean coast of the U.S., and–along with the Iñupiat in Siberia–in Russia. We are several hundred miles above the Arctic Circle, 1,200 miles from the North Pole, all of it ice-covered Arctic Ocean–in other words, the end of the world, northern division. Point Barrow, a few miles north of the town, is the northern tip of the American continents. Except for some Canadian islands, all the Americas are behind you when you stand there. We have come to measure the ice. When you do science into climate change, you often wind up in places like this—if you are lucky.

***

Barrow’s airport is likely the only airport in the world named after victims of an air crash who were killed trying to land there: Wiley Post and Will Rogers, who died in 1935. When you fly in now you are likely to come in an Alaska Airlines 737-400 Combi, unique to the north. The front half is cargo (no windows) and the back half, passengers, usually Eskimos or oil field workers coming or going to Prudhoe Bay east of town. A bulkhead separates the cargo from the passengers. Out the window at dusk, it is grey brown. No lights. There is nothing down there.

The oil workers get off at Deadhorse, the airport nearest the oil fields. The Eskimos continue on the twenty minute flight to Post-Rogers. From there, many travel to their villages and settlements on snow machines or all terrain vehicles (ATVs). Barrow sits on the coast where the part of the Arctic Ocean called the Chukchi Sea meets the Beaufort. It has several distinctions besides really terrible weather. It is one of the two or three northernmost communities in the world, or at least northernmost communities with more than 2,000 people. It is the largest Eskimo settlement in the world, Eskimos not being inclined toward settlements, and is called Ukpeagvik in Iñupiat.Barrow is part of the North Slope Borough (county), the largest municipality in the world (86,000 acres with only 8,000 people, most of whom live in or around Barrow). Sixty-five percent of the population is Iñupiat Eskimo. The Iñupiat have lived there for 1,500 years. While winter temperatures don’t get as cold as they get in Fairbanks, 500 miles south, the position, between the two parts of the Arctic Ocean produces fierce winds which can drive the wind-chill numbers down to ninety degrees below zero (“negative ninety” to Alaskans), where any exposed skin freezes almost instantly and unprotected noses and ears can fall off. It is essentially like living through a Martian summer.

Barrow is surrounded on three sides by ocean and, to the south, flat tundra. There probably isn’t a tree within 300 miles. Most of the year, the ground is covered with snow and, combined with the frozen water at the shore, the predominant colors are white and grey. You cannot tell where ground ends and water begins. In the brief summer when everything turns to and is covered by mud, the primary color changes to brown. In mid- November, the sun goes down for three months. In mid-June it comes up for three months. That doesn’t mean it is always either dark or light; in both seasons much of the time is in a weird brown-pink twilight. Winter darkness helps account for high rates of suicide and alcoholism. Barrow can be very depressing.

Permafrost underlies all of Barrow, the reason all buildings are on stilts. If you built a house directly on the ground, heat from the house would melt the permafrost and the house would sink, sag, or tilt. That is happening in Fairbanks, where the buildings are not elevated. Utilities in the older section of town are in heated tunnels, with all the liquids constantly in motion to keep them from freezing. The tubes are called “utilidors,” as in utility corridors. Some are elevated, square wooden tubes on stilts that cross over the ground and streets. In the newer parts of town, sewage and water are stored in outdoor tanks. The sewage, hopefully, is removed daily before it freezes. Sometimes the “honey bucket” men are new to the job and instead of sucking the sewage out, they blast it back into the house, which is likely what happened in hut 171. Water also is replenished, hopefully, on a daily basis. Most of the homes are heated with natural gas from the nearby North Slope gas fields, an advantage over most Alaskan rural communities that have to rely on expensive, stored heating oil in the winter.

The schools in Alaska tend to be better funded than schools elsewhere, the result of oil revenues, and the ones in Barrow are no exception. They serve as community centers as well as schools. The local high school has a swimming pool open to the community, and thanks the gift of a woman in Florida, the Barrow Whalers, the high school football team, plays on an artificial turf field, which has to be plowed before every practice or game. Alcoholic beverages are banned, as in many Eskimo communities, but it is smuggled in regularly. A Barrow police officer told me that there were several dozen police in Barrow but if they managed to stop the smuggling of alcohol, they would only need three or four. Sober Iñupiat are a peaceful lot. Marijuana is abundant as it is in all of Alaska, most of it home grown indoors where federal authorities are unlikely to find it. It is likely the largest cash crop in the state. Owning small quantities of marijuana is legal in Alaska, a matter of personal privacy according to the state supreme court in this most-libertarian of American states.

Much of the population still depends on subsistence hunting to get through the year, even those men with steady jobs. It is part of the culture.

Nothing comes easy in Barrow. Like most of the towns and villages in rural Alaska (which is almost all of Alaska), there are no roads in or out of town. Indeed, Juneau, the state capital, is the only capital in America inaccessible by highway. Hence, everything in Barrow that does not come from fish or marine mammals is shipped in, either by ocean barge in the summer, or by air the rest of the time; everything from cars ($3,000 for shipping in C-130s) to cans of soup ($2.65 for Campbell’s condensed in the native owned small supermarket) to construction material.1 Eating out is expensive, and there are not many choices. It is sometimes possible to drive into Barrow in the winter, however, which is one of the most dangerous journeys on the planet. A single road links Fairbanks to the oil fields, the Haul Road, technically known as the Dalton Highway. It is a narrow two lane, mostly gravel road used to haul equipment and supplies to Prudhoe Bay—when it is open, which is not often outside of the brief summer. Daring tourists are allowed on the Dalton but very few rental car agencies will let you take their car on the road and you really need to know what you are doing and be well-supplied with emergency gear. Kiss your windshield goodbye: Every vehicle is followed by a cloud of flying gravel. Part of the ride is a hair-raising journey through the Brooks Range. Trucks and cars that made it to Prudhoe Bay, can drive to Barrow in convoys in the winter. Part of the ride is over the snow-covered beach, but much of it is an ice highway over the frozen Beaufort Sea. This is not done very often, and as the climate warms, it becomes even more dangerous

Then there are the bears. Barrow lives with polar bears. Almost no one leaves townwithout a rifle. Sometimes the locals have to kill a bear that gets too close to people,which is perfectly legal. The bears are as dangerous as they are beautiful. On a previous visit, a guide, Daniel Lum, described how a bear pursued his justifiably hysterical wife into their house. He chased the bear away, firing shots over its head. The bears usually congregate on the snow north of town, just beyond the end of the road where the Eskimos butcher the bowhead whales they harvest. The bears will spend months picking the bones clean. They also will wander down the beach into town, which is lined with houses. Visitors are warned—seriously—to watch out for bears whenever they go near the beach. If you see one, you are instructed to walk away slowly—never, ever run. Attacks actually are rare, but the danger is real.

The idea that polar bears a re an endangered species that needs protection from climate change is viewed differently in Barrow than it is in, say, Washington.

Climate change in Barrow has so far affected the dead as well as the living. The Eskimo cemetery at Barrow Point has been moved twice as the burial site now is flooded regularly. The families of the deceased and buried have had to dig up their ancestors and bury them anew, only to have to do it again when the new burial site floods. They likely will have to repeat the process a few more times. But the threat to the living is real. The culture and survival of the Iñupiat—and the bears—depends on the ice.

“We are the hyperboreans,” says one Iñupiat elder. “We live on the ice and snow. If we don’t have the ice and snow, who are we?”

***

Measuring the ice is what Hajo Eicken does.

Eicken, a sea-ice geophysicist at the University of Alaska Fairbanks Geophysical Institute, is part of an international project to measure the recession of sea ice in the Arctic. The term “recession” implies—correctly—that no one doubts the sea ice is receding. Aerial photos, pictures from space and measurements on the ground established that thirty years ago. How much it is receding and the mechanism involved, is what the international project is measuring. Eicken, a tall, thin, bearded associate professor, born and educated in northern most Germany, is a frequent visitor to Barrow and BASC, usually with his graduate students. He has three in tow this time and the goal, as usual, is to go out onto the frozen sea and plant instruments that measure both the ice and the snow on top of the ice throughout the season. The data is then compared to data from previous years to measure the trend. He uses what he measures to gauge the effects of the recession on the local, coastal environment and, in macro, the earth’s climate.

Ice plays a disproportionate role in running climate. It restricts the amount of energy exchanged between the ocean and the atmosphere and reduces the amount of heat supplied to the water. Ice and snow reflect the sun’s radiation, a characteristic scientists call albedo. Open water is dark and absorbs the heat. The ice and snow keeps the polar regions cool by reflecting sunlight, moderating global climate. When this function is damaged, the balance is tipped. Sea ice also helps keep the conveyer belt of ocean currents moving worldwide. Sea ice is essentially salt free. The salt is pushed beneath the ice as it forms, so the water directly under sea ice is saltier and heavier than the rest of the ocean. Salt water also becomes denser as it gets colder (unlike fresh water—see floating ice bergs). Because it is heavier, the water in the Arctic sinks and the gelid, denser water flows south toward the equator and is replaced by warmer, lighter water coming up from the south. If that pattern is altered—say by a reduction in sea ice—the current system in the world’s oceans is disrupted, completely unhinging the climate balance of the planet. If you saw the movie The Day After Tomorrow, that is the premise for a fictional end of civilization. The movie was ridiculous in its conclusions, but the premise was real. Melting sea ice in the Arctic can dramatically alter the climate in the rest of the world.

The ice has been shrinking for the last twenty to forty years and there is nothing in modern records to match it. The retreat in 2007 set all records. This year came close: In the ten days from August 1, 2008, until August 10, 390,000 square miles of ice disappeared. Not only is there less ice in the summer, but less ice is growing back in the winter. In the late 1980s and 1990s, changing wind patterns from the north pushed thick sea ice from the Arctic Ocean into the North Atlantic, where it eventually melted. The thinner ice that formed to replace it melts more readily in the summer, opening up the sea to increasing amounts of radiated heat. That melts more ice and energizes the cycle.

By the end of melting season 2008, the Arctic Ocean sea ice had melted to the second lowest minimum since the use of satellite surveying began, according the National Snow and Ice Data Center. What made this even scarier was that the 2008 summer was relatively cool, yet the ice kept melting, especially in the Chukchi Sea and off Siberia. Some scientists fear that this year we have reached a “tipping point,” and it may be too late to stop the melting.

The minimum extent of the ice this year was measured at 1.74 million square miles. The record, the year before, was 1.59 million square miles.

In some coastal communities, locals depended on wind and waves pushing slush on the ocean to the shore, which would then freeze, forming “fast ice,” ice fast to the land. The ice would form a storm barrier. Warmer temperatures have diminished that process; snow has been replaced by rain, and fall storms have grown in intensity. Winds have blow the shore ice away. Last year, thousands of walruses moved onto the coast near Wainwright, which has never happened before. Apparently the ocean ice floated too far out for them to feed. Models, taken very seriously by scientists, predict an Arctic Ocean free of summer ice by 2040 or 2050. Some predict it will happen sooner. Now think of what that might do to ocean currents and to the weather.

It is not just in Alaska, of course. In Greenland, 553 billion tons of ice melted from the Greenland ice sheet, all of it entering the Atlantic. Some 965,300 square miles of annual ice—the stuff that builds during the winter and melts in the summer—has disappeared, an area one and a half times the area of Alaska, a 50 percent decrease between 2007 and 2008. That now is an area of open, dark water which until recently reflected heat. The Arctic ice has half the volume of only four years ago. The legendary Northwest Passage over Canada and the Northern Sea route over Russian, the dream of explorers for centuries, is open part of the year for the first time in half acentury if not longer. Roald Amundson barely was able to navigate through the ice and islands of the passage to get to the Pacific in the summer of 1903. Now the passage looks like it may become a common shipping lane. Last year a group of German tourists showed up at Barrow. They had sailed in on open water, something they could never do before. There were no customs or immigration officers for 500 miles and no one knew what to do with them. They stayed through a native festival and then sailed back home.

They have vowed to return and this time the government promises to have officials on hand.

This has huge geopolitical ramifications. Already, Canada, the U.S., and Russia are maneuvering to claim sovereignty over part of the world no one cared about before, and it could get nasty. For one thing, the warming climate will permit more oil and gas exploration and there likely are more resources up there. While the chances of Canada and the U.S. having a war over the Arctic is remote, the two countries are unhappy with each other’s attitude. In September, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev ordered officials to mark Russia’s Arctic borders, breaking an arrangement with other countries to let the United Nations decide on territorial claims.

Already the recession is having a global effect. Scientists believe that the drought in the American west and the increased precipitation in parts of Europe are linked to what is happening to the ice off Barrow and the rest of the Arctic. According to the University of Colorado Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Studies, the reduction in sea ice in the Arctic Ocean reduces the severity of cold fronts that drop into the American and Canadian west. That reduces snowfall, which contributes to the drought. Agriculture and the ski industries have already felt the effects. While there is no evidence that climate change has increased the number of hurricanes hitting the U.S., the evidence is growing that the intensity of the storms has increased dramatically. Hurricanes Katrina and Ike may very well be messages from the north.

BASC is the center for research in the area and has all the facilities of a modern research center, most of it coming from the wealthy Iñupiat corporation. Getting funding from the National Science Foundation was sometimes problematic so BASC is cheerfully independent, although it does get some NSF funds. Most of the visiting researchers are housed in Quonset huts, mostly left over from when the facilities were run by the U.S. Navy, or in cottages, like 171. Our cottage had four bedrooms, a full kitchen and bathroom—and on this visit—a bad smell.

Fortunately, BASC shares a large H-shaped building with Ilisagvik Community College, also Iñupiat-run, which has a decent cafeteria.

Alaska is the most-wired state in the U.S., and the facilities in Barrow are hooked by satellite to the Internet. The satellite dishes are pointed almost horizontally to connect to equatorial satellites but the facilities and all the homes in Barrow have Internet and television. Researchers at BASC are plugged in. Eicken has six hours of daylight in which to work when he arrives in Barrow in March. Three weeks earlier, he would have had none. The sun didn’t rise until January 23.

Along with an armed Iñupiat guard (you don’t leave Barrow without one), we leave shortly after 10:30 a.m. on three snow machines. Two of them are pulling long wooden sleds filled with gear. I stand on the back of one of the sleds, instructed to lean against any tilt to help keep the sled upright, which turns out to be the least of my worries. This position, the most exposed, is traditional for newcomers, particularly the nonproductive kind. The wind-chill is negative forty. We are going to plant instruments on the ice.

What does a modern Arctic explorer wear to work? The secrets to keeping warm in temperatures cold enough to alter the molecular structure of steel (minus forty, by the way) are layers and wool. After serious consultation, I am wearing two-layered woolen thermal underwear, flannel padded jeans and Carhartt canvas and fleece snow pants, a quilted woolen shirt, a polyester liner and a Siberian-made parka, certified to negative forty. The boots are Canadian-made Sorels, also certified to forty below, with woolen socks. Note all the wool. Cotton can kill you here because cotton loses the ability to keep you warm once it gets wet and perspiration (or falling through the ice) makes it wet. Wool keeps on keeping you warm. No artificial fabric is as good. I have a woolen balaclava and a wool and polyester neck warmer. I have three layers of gloves and an extra set hung on a cord around my neck I can plunge my hands into if they get cold. Everyone else is dressed approximately the same. Most of us have ski goggles. One serious problem: once you put the mask on—and you will put the mask on—eye glasses fog up and the moisture instantly freezes, rendering you effectively blind. No one has yet invented a solution to that problem so you are faced with a choices of skipping the glasses, or wearing them and looking at the world through a sheet of ice. Contact lenses are the only way to go. I have none.

And speaking of problems: what does the modern explorer (mature male) do if he has to pee? If you are a male explorer over the age of fifty, this is not an inconsequential consideration. The answer usually given is to turn your back to the wind and work as fast as you can. This is not easy with four layers, two zippers, and gloves. The real answer is not to worry: The air is so dry it sucks moisture out of your body and you will go all day without peeing. I found that to be true.

Defecation, on the other hand, is out of the question.

A problem for which I was not prepared is photography. Most batteries quit when the temperature gets below negative twenty and, unless they have spent about a half hour in a warm room, remain useless. Lithium batteries, which I didn’t have, work best in very cold weather. You can stuff the camera in your parka, but you have to be quick.

The other thing I learned is that to do anything with your hands you usually have to take your gloves off (mittens actually, because they are more efficient in keeping your hands warm) and in that cold, it hurts quickly. A few minutes in the mittens—if they are good enough mittens—will fix that, but a few minutes later, off they come again because you have to fiddle with something else, usually involving clothing. Finally, despite zippers, clasps and Velcro, the cold will find any opening between garments, including some you never suspected you had. When we started bouncing over the ice I had the feeling someone had stuck a sharp icicle up my sleeve. I chased down the opening and snapped it shut with Velcro.

The expedition followed the road east, toward Barrow Point, running on the snow that covered the Chukchi beach. Just parallel to the end of the road, we came to a halt.

Four polar bears were at the dump about 200 yards before us, a female, two cubs and what the guard thought was a young male. Perhaps the stupidest thing any sentient creature can do is get near a mother polar bear with her cubs. Bears also don’t like large groups of humans on noisy machines and were taking their time searching for snacks. (“I’m a polar bear and I’ll move when I damned well please.”) Polar bears can weigh 1,600 pounds and stand almost 10- feet tall when they rear on their rear legs, although none of these bears were near that size. They were between us and the sea iceso we waited until they moved on, about ten minutes. When they finally sauntered off, we resumed the trip, finally curving off the beach onto the frozen sea. My instructions were to not only try to keep the sled upright but to turn my face away from the direction we were traveling if the wind got too bad. With the balaclava, the goggles and the parka collar, not much wind got to my face and it was not unbearable. I needed to see where we were going to anticipate the bumps. I was told to keep my knees flexed to absorb the shocks and I did it successfully all but once. I wasn’t paying attention for one bump and felt the shock particularly where my spine meets my neck. Eicken, who was driving the snow machine pulling mysled, could see obstacles and bumps and slowed when the ice got particularly ragged.

The ice is rarely flat or smooth. There are occasional cracks, but mostly there are pressure ridges caused by the motion of the ice, in part reacting to tidal pressure and waves. Hunks, blocks and ridges glistening in the sunlight, their shadows a grey blue,were tumbled across the ice. This was fast ice. On top of the ice was several months’ accumulation of bone-dry snow. Snowball fights are impossible here; the snow will not form balls. It was not clear when we passed from the snow covering the beach and thesnow covering the ice and water.

Eicken located the site he wanted using GPS positioning. It was a relatively flat section of ice with a pressure ridge about four feet high a couple of hundred yards to the west. The bear guard put up a tent with a gas heater, and Eicken’s team began unloading the equipment and setting up their stations.

Essentially, the UAF team was studying three things: the thickness and temperature of the snow, the thickness of the ice below the snow, and the depth of the water beneath the ice. They were setting up automatic stations that would transmit readings back to Barrow and would be able to track the data from the Internet back in Fairbanks until “melt” in the end of May. The equipment was powered by two car batteries, which like all batteries, suffer in the cold. They transmitted their condition back to shore and someone from BASC would go out and recharge or replace them when they ebbed.

The main instrument was erected on a scaffold-like structure with cables leading to holes bored in the ice. The cables were protected by metal coverings because Arctic foxes love to play with scientific equipment, particularly if electricity is involved. Electricity turns them on. “If we come back tomorrow, we will probably find a fox turd on the box,” one of the grad students said. Another student walked along the pressureridge with an instrument measuring snow depth. Occasionally, a breeze would pick up and you would understand just how truly awful it could be. Soon our faces were entirely covered with frost, our eye lashes froze, and ice hung from our eyebrows. We were lucky it wasn’t much worse.

The ice was about three feet thick over twenty-two feet of almost frozen Chukchi Sea water. About six inches of snow covered the ice. The snow was weird. The sound you made walking on it was a metallic hollow sound, not what you want to hear when you are standing over twenty-two feet of really cold water. We eventually got all the instruments in (I was of no use). Eicken decided to go back before the students finished the last of the instruments, and I rode back on the backseat of his snow machine.

I quickly decided that if I was going to die on the ice, it would be on this ride. We flew. We bounced. We tilted. We roared. I held on to two handholds behind me until I lost all feelings in the hands. I could see a little through my goggles (I gave up on the glasses early on) and tried to anticipate when I needed to hold on for dear life or when I just needed to keep attached to the machine. Moreover, earlier I had been in the warm up tent adjusting my clothing and I brushed my right arm against the gas heater. This melted the outer layer of my Russian parka. I didn’t notice. When I got on the snowmobile I began to stream Siberian goose feathers behind. We eventually got back to BASC and I ran into the warm equipment room, still leaving a trail of feathers. The arm was patched with duct tape, which true Alaskans will tell you, is what really holds Alaska civilization together.

The next morning we found out that a bear had knocked over the equipment and the UAF team had to go out again.

All this was when the weather was relatively good. In April, one of the graduate students was caught in a whiteout which was potentially life-threatening. He had to wait until he could move.

Eicken’s measurements are crucial to understanding what is happening in Alaska and why it affects what will happen to the rest of the world because of it.

The book ends with a soon-to-be classic speech: ”Whenever they’s a fight so hungry people can eat a Big Mac, I’ll be there. Whenever they’s a cop harassing some dude for having California licenses, I’ll be there . . . . I’ll be in the way guys yell when their football team scores a touchdown an’-I’ll be in the way kids laugh when they’re watchin’ “Miley Cyrus” an’ they know it’s time to go to Chili’s. An’ when our folks eat the stuff they buy at Whole Foods an’ live in the houses they’ve flipped for a profit-why, I’ll be there.”

–Jon Shurkin (that’s my boy!)

Richard Feynman

A team at the University of Maryland, publishing in Science, was able to teleport the quantum identity of one atom to another atom a few feet away. . The process is actually what physicists call entanglement, where two particles in the quantum universe become so entangled with each other that if you change something in one, the other changes automatically.

Some of the theory goes back to Richard Feynman in 1981, who argued it might be possible to make use of quantum states to store information, the first notion of a quantum computer. Feynman said you can have 32 quantum states in an electron, not just zeros and ones. The Maryland team took two ions of ytterbium (don’t ask), cooled them to a hair above absolute zero. They wrote quantum information on one ion using a microwave pulse. The second ion was left in an indefinite state. Then they hit each one with a laser so it would emit a photon. The photons were collected by a lens, passed through fiber optics to a beam splitter. Detectors caught and recorded the photons but because it was not known which photon came from which ion, the two photons became entangled. So did the ions. This makes no sense whatsoever, I know, but we’re talking quantum physics here and quantum physics makes no sense.

The information written on one ion was teleported to the other. Don’t get too excited: it fails more than it succeeds. In fact out of 100 million tries, it teleported once and it took 10 minutes to make the information transfer.

You expected competence in the Bush White House?—Barack Obama and his team are Mac people and he is addicted to his Blackberry. He ran the most technologically advanced political campaign in histoy and won. Then he stepped into the White House and found himself back in the 1990s. Apparently the old administration was as incompetent with its  office technology as it was with running the country. The computers were old, the software hilarious. According to Wired and the Washington Post, Little Bush was running six-year-old Windows XP and his office reported it had not had not upgraded to maintain security. Virus protection was minimal, and although the White House was not infected by the virus epidemic of 2007, it was just asking for trouble. It had already been hacked once from China. It’s possible the reason it was not infected is that none of the malware writers could believe the IT in the White House was that awful.The solution, of course, is to switch to Macs, which are so far virus proof. And Mac OS-X is like five generations removed from XP.

It wasn’t a “crash” and it wasn’t a “miracle”--The “Miracle on the Hudson,” the incident involving US Air Airbus, in which 155 walked or swam away, is a terrific example of journalists using sloppy language and missing the story.

First, it wasn’t a crash. A crash is an uncontrolled descent into something, usually land or water, sometimes a building or another plane. The pilots of Flight 1549 were in total control and made a forced landing in the water. It wasn’t a crash. They knew exactly what they were doing and did it splendidly. And it was a miracle only if you think competence is a miracle these days, which is not an unreasonable assumption in George Bush’s America. The flight crew and the cabin crew were trained for just such an event, over and over again for years, and they did exactly what they were trained to do. Evacuate an A-320 in 90 seconds without anyone getting badly hurt? That’s what is supposed to happen. Even the passengers did their job, getting out without resorting to panic. Flight attendants (I’m old enough to remember when they were “stewardesses” and romantic figures) are not there to serve you “your choice of entrees for $5″ but to assist in case of emergencies. (The first flight attendants, in the 1930s, had to be nurses). These folks did it. 

The incident is the best lesson I know for paying attention during the safety comments at the beginning of each flight. I know you’ve heard it before. I know they are usually boring (an exception is the funny cartoon shown on Virgin America on each flight. Love the nun). The very least you can do is look around to see the nearest exit in case you need to use it. At least one passenger said he did what I always do–count the number of seat rows to the exit so I can find my way there if I can’t see.

There is more. Anyone notice that hours after that 320 hit the water, its fuel tanks full of heavy fuel, one of its doors open to the water, it was still floating? Modern jets are like that.

There hasn’t been a fatal air crash in the U.S. in two years (a commuter plane in Kentucky) and the last disaster involving a full-sized jet in the U.S. was eight years ago. Same record for Western Europe and Canada. Part of the reason is that modern aircraft are damned near foolproof. They are so automated that by and large, you and I can fly them. They can land, take-off, and cruise automatically. It’s only when shit happens you really need a pilot (and then you really need a pilot). And they are structurally amazing. Modern jets have flown with major pieces missing. An Aloha Airlines 737 suffered a major decompression in 1988 and a large part of fuselage blew off and the plane still landed, it’s passengers sitting in seats in the open. It takes a major explosion to bring down a 747, a plane many in aviation consider otherwise indestructible. Someone figured out the odds of a child growing up to be elected President of the United States are better than the odds of getting killed in an airline crash in American or the rest of the industrialized world.

So what happened in New York last week was a combination of competence, training and people doing what they were supposed to do under extreme conditions. It may have been something of a miracle, I guess. It was certainly not a “crash.”

And the guy sitting next to you turning pale during turbulence is still going to be me. Unless the Xanax and gin kick in properly.

Here comes Peter Cottontail. Run!–

 Macquarie island teems with wildlife, including 80,000 sea elephants (the mind boggles) and 3.5 million seabirds, some of which are endangered. The island has been named a World Heritage Site by UNESCO. [Webcam here] it is the only place on Earth where rocks from the Earth’s mantle (6 km below the ocean floor) are being actively exposed above sea-level. Through the centuries, ships have wandered in. Some of the vessels carried mice, rats, cats and rabbits. I don’t know why rabbits, except for the meat, but rabbits came in with sealing gangs in 1878. The cats had been there for 50 years. Cats, being cats, had turned feral.

To eliminate the rabbits, myxomatosis and rabbit fleas were introduced which did reduce the rabbit population, but did not entirely eliminate them. With food supplies reduced, the cats starting going for the birds. So it was necessary to do something about the cats. For about $16.2 million U.S. a program began to wipe out the kitties. Soon, the cats were gone, the last one killed in 2000. The remaining rabbits, being rabbits, multiplied ferociously and began eating up most of the island’s vegetation, which the birds use for cover. The birds stopped reproducing. Liz Weren, of the Parks and Wildlife Service of Tasmania, said they expected the rabbit population to grow once the cats were gone, but not nearly as much as it did. She pointed out the plan was a partial success because some bird species, such as the grey petrel, began breeding on the island again. But, everyone agrees, the right plan was to kill off all the rabbits at the same time they were eliminating all the cats.

“Our study shows that between 2000 and 2007 there has been widespread ecosystem devastation and decades of conservation effort compromised. The lessons for conservation agencies globally is that interventions should be comprehensive, and include risk assessments to explicitly consider and plan for indirect effects, or face substantial subsequent costs,” said Dana Bergstrom of the the Australia Antarctic Division.

Australia has a glorious record of screwing up its environment with rabbits. The first ones arrived in 1788 and since then, rabbits have brought about the greatest destruction of native species of any animal. Aussies hate them. The current crop of rabbits was deliberately introduced there by a guy named Thomas Austin, who let some loose so he could hunt them.

Starting in 2010, using GPS technology, helicopters will drop poison at specific locations to get the cats, the mice, the rats and the rabbits. Can’t wait to see what happens then

.

Not so much–Shall we talk about words that made you barf last year? I have a book proposal out and I deliberately used two of the clichés presented above so i could appear trendy. I hated myself in the morning. I jump all over my students who use them, and here I went and did it myself– and you out there. Don’t you hide!

Every year, Lake Superior College does a major public service by presenting a list of words that make you want to throw up last year, words that were really clever the first time someone used them and about 1,167 times later, not so much? (Where the hell did that come from?). The college, located in Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan, calls it a list of words that should be banished from the Queen’s English. People send in nominations and the p.r. office (in an act of heroism–pure heroism) posts them on its blog. It doesn’t get nearly enough publicity, so here, being maverick that I am, and doing nothing to increase my carbon footprint, will help out. I’ve added a few.

Green is no longer a color, it is a cliché. “The ubiquitous ‘Green’ and all of its variables, such as ‘going green,’ ‘building green,’ ‘greening,’ ‘green technology,’ ‘green solutions’ and more, drew the most attention from those who sent in nominations this year,” the college reported. Kind of makes you green, doesn’t it?

Carbon footprint reminded one contributor  to envision “microscopic impressions on the surface of the earth where an atom of carbon forgot to wear its shoes.”

Ah, and the election. Can a super delegate also be a maverick, dude? I suppose they are if they voted for Ron Paul.

The word bailout, which applies to Wall Street but not Main Street, means the government shovels buckets of money to people who made the financial mess and forgets those of us who have to walk behind the elephant with the shovel. Apparently, I don’t have enough toxic assets (although I have a pair of socks upstairs that would kill a barnacle). I thought I was too big to fail.

In text messages (which is rapidly becoming a dialect of English) the heart symbol replaces the word love, the college points out, and everything has the suffix monkey, as in dudemonkey, I suppose. And when does a performer–or anything else–become iconic? And who decides? And can you be iconic if you were only  but never actually won the sucker? Not so much.

According to Google, people used iconic 13,500,000 times, which is 12,999,900 times too many; carbon footprint, 3,900,000 times, and maverick, God help us, 23,300,000 and it is all John McCain’s fault.

Back in June, sociologist Mark Regnerus at the University of Texas, did a study on just how seriously these pressures work, and like everyone else who has studied the issue, his answer to the question in his book, Forbidden Fruit: Sex & Religion in the Lives of American Teenagers is: it depends. Mostly, it doesn’t work at all. A new study out of Johns Hopkins, comes to the same conclusion. The Bush administration, never known to let science get into the way of ideology, has spent more than $200 million promoting abstinence programs.

 Janet E. Rosenbaum, a post-doctoral fellow at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, compared those who had taken a virginity pledge with similar teens who hadn’t taken a pledge. She didn’t include teens who were unlikely to take a pledge, the ones out there happily screwing their heads off. The findings were published in the January issue of the journal Pediatrics.

“Virginity pledgers and similar non-pledgers don’t differ in the rates of vaginal, oral or anal sex or any other sexual behavior,” Rosenbaum said. “Strikingly, pledgers are less likely than similar non-pledgers to use condoms and also less likely to use any form of birth control.” They also are more likely to deny ever making the pledges.

Rosenbaum collected data on 934 high school students who had never had sex or had taken a virginity pledge. The data came from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health. She matched kids who took the pledge with those who did not. After five years those who took the pledge and those who did not had similar sexual experiences.

Previous studies, many done by Peter Bearman of Columbia and Hannah Brueckner of Yale, showed similar results. One study found that it depended on the world the kids lived in, what kind of school they went to. Other studies found that the pledges may have lasted about a year, but then the pledgers matched the non-pledgers. Those who took pledges had as many sexually transmitted diseases as the others.

Teens who had taken a pledge had 0.1 fewer sex partners during the past year, but the same number of partners overall as those who had not pledged. And pledgers started having sex at the same age as non-pledgers, Rosenbaum found.

The study also found that teens who took a virginity pledge were 10 percent less likely to use a condom and less likely to use any other form of birth control than their non-pledging counterparts.

“Sex education programs for teens who take pledges tend to be very negative and inaccurate about condom and birth control information,” Rosenbaum said.

Oh, and five years after taking a pledge, 80% of the teens denied they had ever done so. “This high rate of disaffiliation may imply that nearly all virginity pledgers view pledges as nonbinding,” Rosenbaum said.

On Dec. 27, some 11,000 protesters held a virtual nurse-in by uploading breast-feeding photos onto their Facebook profiles, and a couple of dozen women showed up at the company’s headquarters in Palo Alto to breast-feed there. By Dec. 30, more than 85,000 members had joined a Facebook group called “Hey, Facebook, breastfeeding is not obscene!”

You have to wonder what Americans have against tits. You might wonder what kind of childhood the authorities at Facebook had. Where is Freud when we need him? By the way, Woody Allen predicted this. 

[Picture above: actress Maggie Gyllenhaal, breast feeding. Come and get me, tough guys.]