Arctic Science Journeys
Radio Script
1996

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Season of Science
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"Hello, this is Mike Castellini. We are madly trying to get packed to go out into the field on Monday. It's out of control here in our lab. I will be back into the office and somewhat human again by the 17th or 18th of June. Okay, bye. . . "

STORY: It's summer time, and trying to find a researcher near a phone is darn near impossible. It seems that nearly every scientist in Alaska is either in the woods, on a ship at sea, incommunicado on the tundra, or camped on some volcano. It's an annual ritual that has scientists packing their bags, forwarding their mail and heading out into the field.

For Mike Castellini, a marine mammal scientist at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, summer is synonymous with sea lions. He and his graduate students spend each summer on the Gulf of Alaska studying the mysterious decline of Steller sea lions. Richard Merrick is there, too. Merrick is a biologist with the National Marine Fisheries Service.

"The boat work that I'm doing, we basically work at a number of locations and while we're there we are going 24 hours a day. For some of the other projects, which are really dependent on individual animals, of capturing and recapturing them, it's real pulsed. There's a team in the central Aleutians and also there's a team in Southeast run by ADF&G [the Alaska Department of Fish and Game]. They'll start off for the first week or so working to capture 10 adult females. And then for the next two weeks, they're letting those animals stay at sea and then they'll go back through the process of starting to recapture these animals at the end of the month. So then they're busy again."

UAF biologist Jim Sedinger will spend the summer on the marshy plains of the Yukon River Delta in remote western Alaska. There he's studying how rising sea levels are affecting the delta's plants and animals. But for him, the pace isn't so rushed. The food, tents, generators, fuel, boats and a thousand other items he'll use were packed and shipped into the field weeks ago.

"We haul our gear from the Yupik Eskimo village of Chevak by snowmachine. It's about 20 miles as the crow flies from Chevak to our camp site. And it takes about 30 to 40 snowmachine loads to get all of our gear and fuel out there."

They'll have to work fast, too, because they know all too well that summer in Alaska is long on daylight but short on time. Jim Reynolds leads a group of state/federal scientists engaged in studies on everything from water quality in the Brooks Range to how reindeer and muskox get along.

"That's fairly typical, to have people everywhere--just about everywhere--in the state. We have them in Southeast, we have them out in the Aleutians, and throughout Arctic Alaska and the Interior."

By the end of the summer, scientists will have collected reams of new information about Alaska's environment. But the work won't end there. They'll spend the winter analyzing what they've found. Maybe then they'll have more time to talk. For Arctic Science Journeys, this is Debra Damron.