Zoom: From Atoms and Galaxies to Blizzards and Bees: How Everything Moves (11 page)

Where the spaces between ground and snowpack are filled, the rodents build meandering tunnels, half in the ground and half in the snow. These trenches dominate the scenery as soon as the snow melts down to an inch or two in the spring. Zoological winter motion unfolds continuously, even if our eyes see none of it.

The world’s warming climate doesn’t help make life in Alaska any easier for the natives, human and otherwise—although you would think the opposite would be true. Temperatures are rising far more at high latitudes than anywhere else. Permafrost, still a dominant aspect of the far-northern experience, is now undergoing dramatic changes. This directly affects the people who live in Arctic villages and communities. According to a recent report from the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the current steady thawing of Arctic permafrost is “likely to have significant implications for infrastructure, including houses, buildings, roads, railways and pipelines.”

Experts believe that by the mid-twenty-first century permafrost will decline by 20 to 35 percent. I could vividly see this happening as I drove toward Chena, passing those sagging homes with fun-house ramps. Even the famous Alaska Highway, called the Alcan by everyone there, is suffering collapse in spots because of the melting permafrost upon which it’s largely built. On July 23, 2012, on the seventieth anniversary of the completion of that historic road, the New York Times noted, “As the climate warms, stretches of permafrost are… melting—leaving pavement with cracks, turning asphalt into washboard and otherwise threatening the stability of the road.”

Where the permafrost has been replaced with seasonal thawing and refreezing cycles, bizarre phenomena materialize. One of them has the odd name of pingo. This is a mound up to ten stories tall formed when material on the ground is periodically pushed skyward by the relentless annual heaving.

Some lakes in Siberia abruptly vanish, thanks to thermokarst conditions, which occur when rising temperatures melt enough of the permafrost to open up creepy passages into the bowels of the earth. Suddenly large lakes drain away overnight. They empty as if someone pulled a bathtub plug. You can’t make this stuff up.3

Pulling into Chena after a ten-year absence, I appraised this end-of-the-road, escape-from-civilization outpost anew. It had changed little. It’s now slightly spiffed up, thanks to the fact that sellout crowds of Japanese tourists now regularly visit the northern lights, which to them are sacred. But truth to tell, Chena’s layout and cabins are still just a notch up from “funky.” Indeed, much of rural Alaska is funky. Most villages look like glorified trailer parks. They’re dominated by tiny ranch houses or cabins with makeshift steps and small windows and yards piled with old engines and tarps. The sheer unpretentiousness has, I suppose, its own honest appeal.

The last time up here I’d rented a plane, taken advantage of Chena’s snowy runway, and headed north past the nearby Arctic Circle to land at villages like Bettles, population twelve, that have no roads at all. When the frozen rivers melt, everything gets in and out by small plane. After I landed on the white-packed runway, pretending I was a bush pilot even though the real McCoys have nerves and guts totally out of my league, I located the single diner-type restaurant among the small hunkered-down cottages. All the patrons looked up from their meals. They kept staring; they don’t get many visitors. I was the entertainment. The women were flirty. The men were strangely silent and wide-eyed. Yet late winter is a fascinating time to come—better than summer, with its relentless clouds of mosquitoes and endless, sleep-inhibiting daylight, which means no possible chance to see the legendary lights. “March is the best month,” I’d heard the natives say repeatedly.

Chena offers basic wood cabins, dogsledding, and—the big draw—a natural hot spring that feeds a hot pond. You relax in the three-feet-deep, 102-degree water under the auroras while your hair freezes solid. Afterward, a thirty-minute trip in a tank-tread arctic vehicle resembling a giant bulldozer with an enclosed cabin on top takes you up and up, far from the hot springs and the cabins, to a flat region at the top of a mountain surrounded by distant, jagged, snow-covered peaks in all directions. You first put on all the warm clothes you own—two layers of long johns, pants and hoodie, the works, and follow this with an orange government-issue polar jumpsuit. It’s still bitter cold.

Last time I was here, when the temperature was minus thirty-five degrees Fahrenheit, I stepped outside with a cup of boiling water and tossed it in the air. The liquid made a loud tinkling, crackling sound and hit the ground as frozen pieces of ice. Tonight felt no warmer, though the thermometer registered a mild minus twenty degrees Fahrenheit.

At the summit, the northern lights not only filled the sky but also painted the snowy landscape green. For a hundred miles in all directions the pointy mountains glowed emerald. This was routine for the hot spring’s owners, who bravely took over what was a struggling state-owned enterprise in 2000. Tonight they stared at the waving jade curtains for the fiftieth time this season, once again standing mutely in awe. At least I think it was awe. It might simply have been too cold for small talk. Being in awe and being frozen produce similar behavior.

No one spoke while the aurora undulated. The blotches, rays, arcs, and curtains rustle leisurely, like draperies in some vast celestial kingdom. The changes resemble the mutation speed of low clouds on a summer day. Keep staring, and the movement is barely perceptible. Look away for a minute and then turn back, and the scene has been totally transformed. Here in central Alaska, observers often gaze from directly beneath those curtains so that their “folds” angle vertically up, converging like railroad tracks straight overhead. Blotches vanish and are replaced. Pink fringes come and go. The slow-mo choreography can’t be predicted.

But the unseen entity fashioning it, the wizard behind the auroral curtain, is anything but sluggish.

The drama begins with an epic blast of solar particles escaping the clutches of both the sun’s gravity and its magnetic field. It was physicist Gene Parker who first surmised, in the 1950s, that the sun, the nearest star to Earth, leaks a continuous stream of broken atom fragments—an outflow he called the solar wind. The reward for his prescience: people openly scoffed. It was only when spacecraft launched after 1957 actually detected this nonstop swarm of material—about ten particles for each sugar-cube volume of space, all hurtling outward at a few hundred miles a second—that Parker went from goat to prophet.

Accompanying his promotion came a slow recognition of the ways in which the sun’s wind has been affecting our solar system all along. Soon everyone, with the groupie wisdom of hindsight, said, “Of course! That must be why comets’ tails always point away from the sun. Comets are like wind socks. They’re blown back by the solar wind. We should have known!”

It took until the 1970s, however, before researchers discovered the truly superdense, superspeedy solar winds that make Parker’s solar wind seem by comparison a mere zephyr. These explosions blast away ten billion tons of material at a time at five hundred miles a second. Called CMEs, or coronal mass ejections, they are the real deal and can inflict serious damage on our electrical grid and satellites.

That’s the rough motion picture of the sun’s particle geysers. But, as always, the devil is in the details. Our planet’s magnetosphere can direct those shotgun pellets of solar detritus safely around and past our world, but only if the swarm’s field and our planet’s field share the same magnetic polarity—if, for example, both fields have their norths aimed upward. As they say in magnetic gossip circles, “Like repels like.”

Though their motion is imperceptible to the eye, these Alaskan glaciers typically advance toward the sea at the speed of a foot per hour.

Conversely, if the buzzing swarm of solar hornets has a polarity aligned opposite ours, it will transfer its energy to our planet’s field. Then the charged particles slither angrily down our magnetic field and into our upper atmosphere. This creates huge electrical charges. Oxygen atoms in the thin air one hundred miles above us have their electrons excited. They emit an alien green glow as these electrons fall back into their preferred, accustomed positions. That’s the entire aurora story.

The whole thing is a motion demo. Sun material in motion. Our own air’s electrons in motion. The aurora itself, like living abstract art, in vivid, fabulous motion—even if it takes a minute before the scene has completely transformed itself.

What’s surprising is how few people in Alaska understand the process even in a general way. They look up routinely at the lights, but I’ve overheard many “explain” to their companions that it’s sunlight reflected off the oceans from the bright side of Earth or deliver some similarly discredited nineteenth-century elucidation.

Apparently, like Gene Parker’s supersonic solar wind, science knowledge has its own motion. And this, as in the old days of Jack London and his Inuit fantasy tales, sometimes moves with all the alacrity of Alaska’s blue ice.

CHAPTER 7: April’s Hidden Mysteries

Deciphering the Secrets of Spring

(but

true

to the incomparable

couch of death thy

rhythmic

lover

thou answerest

them only with

spring)

—E. E. CUMMINGS, “O SWEET SPONTANEOUS” (1920)

It was April, after a warm winter. A million-ring circus erupted in the mountains of the Northeast, the calendar thrown out the window. Bees circled wildly around neon-yellow forsythia, weeks ahead of schedule. At the renowned Cornell University Cooperative Extension, top botany, zoology, and entomology experts scratched their heads, helping local farmers figure out how such early springs affect apple trees and such.

Even after a normal northern winter, with its unchanging monochrome, the noun spring doubles as a verb. Countless actions spring to life. They set children’s minds going: How fast do flowers open? Trees grow? Insects fly? Saps flow? How does it all happen?

Mere recitations of speed data wouldn’t do justice to the whole choreographed enterprise. Not when colorful complexity pops everywhere like jack-in-the-boxes, spurred by sun and warmth. For biology is really the friendly face of physics. As temperature increases, so do all the enzymatic, mitochondrial, glucose-transfer, and other reactions upon which life is based.1 We mammals make our own heat, and when that’s too difficult we hibernate, drop our body thermometers by ten degrees or so, and wait it out. During hibernation a chipmunk’s heartbeat slows from 350 beats per minute to as little as four. The pace of activity—within bodies and around them—becomes glacial, as a sleeping community of bears, bats, ground squirrels, and woodchucks snore unseen, often much nearer to our bedrooms than we imagine.

But plants and invertebrates can’t do this. They need winter to end. So when it does, and when they—meaning insects, worms, tadpoles, and the like—emerge, so do their predators: birds, raccoons, and foxes. The whole awesome production materializes together. That’s why spring isn’t just a season. It’s a motion-based event.2

In subtropical Florida, Southern California, and Texas, spring begins in February and moves one hundred miles north each week. Air travelers observe its vivid border as opening blossoms and leaves rush poleward at the speed of one kilometer, or 0.6 miles, per hour. Spring travels about the same rate as a parent pushing a stroller.

Over the course of three months, spring proceeds more than a thousand miles to envelop all of Maine, North Dakota, Montana, and Washington State as well as parts of southern Canada. In mountainous regions it sweeps first through the valleys and then climbs ever higher up the hills.

Plants bloom in the same sequence year after year. The earliest—snowdrops and crocuses—pop up where the snow has barely melted. They’re soon followed by bulbs, such as tulips and daffodils. At that point the changes are measured in days, with the arrival of the bright yellow forsythia bushes. And then the first tree buds and baby leaves burst forth from the impatient chartreuse performers, such as willows, magnolias, maples, and rhododendrons. Cherry blossoms appear around this time, too.

Insects emerge from their winter dormitories. Like plants, they do not wait for a particular date but respond to warmer temperatures. Some, like butterflies, go through the full spectrum of life stages in tree hollows and crevices during the winter—larvae, eggs, and adults—so that they can hit the ground running in the spring. Migrating aviators, such as robins and red-winged blackbirds, arrive earliest to get in on this first action. They catch the initial emerging insects and worms after using the same flyways they traveled in the autumn, when they went south. Now they lay claim to their breeding and feeding territories.

Insect development only occurs when the temperature rises above a particular threshold, which is often fifty degrees. Once it gets warm enough, it almost seems as if spontaneous generation is at play: they’re suddenly everywhere. Ants start walking, at an average speed of one-fifth of a mile per hour. (By contrast, thunder covers that same one-fifth of a mile in a second, making thunder 3,600 times faster than ants.)

Each species has its own story and public relations image. Everyone loves butterflies, which boast mellifluous names in all Romance languages: papillon in French; mariposa in Spanish. Even German manages to make butterfly a bit less guttural than usual: der Schmetterling. Bees and dragonflies get good press, too.

But not mosquitoes, of course. They come in some 3,500 known species—new ones are still being identified—and have been called the most deadly creatures on earth, thanks mostly to the three varieties that carry the diseases malaria, dengue, and yellow fever. Only the females suck blood from vertebrates such as ourselves.

Movement plays a key role in our mosquito experience. They need standing water and rarely venture more than a mile from their breeding ground. So if you control the stagnant pools of water in your area (meaning no old tires, sagging tarps, and the like) you may be able to completely prevent their appearance. In deeply wooded places, such as Maine and especially Alaska, where small nooks, ponds, and saturated soil left over from rain, melted snow, and permafrost are virtually everywhere, it’s a hopeless cause.