Fruits of science ripen in Alaska
Another ugly oil spill is surely on its way.
But there may be hope over the horizon for stroke victims, or for those who suffer inexplicable moodiness.
As for air travelers, the skies are safer over the polar route these days. But not so everywhere else.
Good news, bad news.
It was this kind of a get-together recently in a town where good and bad come in extremes.
The setting was Valdez, population 4,200 and home of America’s worst oil spill and some of the nation’s most spectacular nature: a mighty collision of glaciers, mountains, waterfalls and ocean. The gathering was of the American Assn. for the Advancement of Science, which drew about 150 of Alaska’s top researchers.
For eavesdroppers, here was a chance to sample the incremental work of modern science, those inquiries that seldom make headlines but which, in sum, beg a question: Can people make things better faster than they make them worse?
Perhaps no one hit the issue any more squarely than Richard Prentki. During a panel presentation titled: “Lessons of the Exxon Valdez,” he represented the U.S. government’s Minerals Management Service, the agency that issues offshore oil leases.
Lesson No. 1, Prentki said, is that despite the 1989 spill of 11 million gallons of crude from the Exxon Valdez, Alaskans need more oil. Actually, it’s the taxes from oil they most need, to pay for roads and sewers and schools. It was unnecessary in front of this audience to extend Prentki’s logic. Without oil, Alaska residents might have to pay taxes instead of receiving a yearly check for $1,300 per person in oil-royalty “dividends” from the state.
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Lesson No. 2, Prentki continued, is more oil spills are the price of oil development. He presented a statistical risk assessment suggesting that six to 14 large spills are “most likely” to be expected during the lifetime of existing petroleum fields and those planned for development.
“It’s a fact of life: Sooner or later, the statistics say, another major oil spill is probable,” he reported.
But earlier at the gathering in the oversized Valdez convention center, scientists heard a more encouraging report. The subject: brain damage from stroke.
By investigating how arctic ground squirrels arouse from hibernation and restart their brains without cell injury, a team from the Institute of Arctic Biology at the University of Alaska in Fairbanks reported “promising” possibilities. Someday, the secrets of squirrels may help people whose brains have suffered rapid blood loss.
Just as tantalizing was a tiny pilot study conducted by a psychologist at the University of Alaska. People in high latitudes have long known that winter darkness gives them the blues. Now this study, which paralleled research underway elsewhere, reported “the first early evidence” that humans may be even more greatly affected by unseen changes in the Earth’s geomagnetic field.
Apart from the official proceedings, a casual hallway conversation produced one of the scariest stories of the conference: a case of good science, slow bureaucracy and dangerous skies.
Syun-Ichi Akasofu, director of the Alaska Geophysical Institute in Fairbanks, calmly recalled the 1989 eruption of Mt. Redoubt in south-central Alaska. Scientists at the institute correctly forecast the eruption 12 hours in advance and notified the Federal Aviation Administration.
It was well known at the time that the gritty ash clouds from volcanoes posed a threat to the engines of airliners. And sure enough, an unsuspecting KLM 747, flying the busy polar air corridor, traveled into the ash plume the following day and lost all power. It glided downward for 12 minutes until the crew could restart its engines.
What has not been so well known was that at the time the FAA and other U.S. government agencies had no system to monitor the paths of ash plumes--even though 80 airliners have been damaged by volcanic ash in the last 15 years. Akasofu said federal officials initially would not even support a study, so his scientists had to turn to foreign airlines and the Anchorage Duty Free Shop for the $80,000 to develop a supercomputer program that would predict movements of ash plumes along the northern arc of the volcanic “ring of fire.”
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Finally last year, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration decided to make ash plumes a federal matter in the airspace over Alaska and eastern Russia’s Kamchatka Peninsula.
“Our system, adopted worldwide, would not cost more than the repair of one jet engine after encountering the plume,” Akasofu said. “Unfortunately, it will take a crash for the danger to become news.”
Which seems to be the way of things, in Valdez as elsewhere. Even as we struggle to make life otherwise. American novelist James Branch Cabell put it this way: “The optimist proclaims we live in the best of all worlds; and the pessimist fears this is true.”
