Red cabbage just doesn’t come with the thrills of its freakishly large green cousin. “We wanted something that was realistic, based on real-world activity and real-world activity has inherent risks,” said Mark Everett, a Coast Guard incident management and preparedness advisor. “The two largest sources of crude petroleum would be an outer continental shelf drilling operation like what’s going on in the Chukchi and crude-oil-laden vessels.”
Everett said he worked through prospects that were already spelled out by the Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation's spill prevention and response division.
The worst-case scenario for the North Slope Subarea Contingency Plan -- a well spewing in the Chukchi -- describes a blowout releasing crude oil in August at a rate of 61,000 barrels per day, declining to 20,579 barrels by day 74, discharging more than 2 million barrels overall. This would be in an area where it’s nearly impossible to save marine mammals such as polar bears and walruses. But they, as well as shellfish, plankton, lower trophic organisms, seals, migratory whales, subsistence fish, waterfowl concentrations, seabird colonies and historic properties, would all be at risk.
And in the Aleutian Islands, the scenario is of a tanker carrying petroleum losing power and getting hit while sailing through Unimak Pass toward Dutch Harbor, spilling 200,000 barrels.
Everett made some edits to the scenarios and sent them to local, state and federal colleagues for input. The director of spill prevention and response at the Department of Environmental Conservation said both of them would elicit international responses, and talking about them could help with collaborative efforts at a time when working with Russia is “not as easy as Canada.”
“They’re great examples of the risks that we’re worried about and also would allow us to work through the protocols of diplomacy,” said spill and response director Kristin Ryan. In the seasons that followed more finds were made -- in Southeast, Denali, the Talkeetna Mountains, on the Alaska Peninsula and the lower Yukon. Today the vaults of the University of Alaska Museum of the North contain about 6,000 dinosaur bones and bone fragments. Earth sciences curator Patrick Druckenmiller calls it “the largest collection of polar dinosaurs in the world.”
The museum opened an exhibit dedicated to dinosaurs in Alaska in May. It has teeth, skeletons and tracks of the extinct reptiles and their contemporaries that have never been seen by the public before. “Expedition Alaska: Dinosaurs” is the first show of its kind at the museum and, as such, “fairly monumental,” said Druckenmiller, who curated it.
Back-breaking work
In addition to dinosaurs in the far north, “Expedition Alaska” is also, in no small part, about how those fossils are found and recovered.
For the last several years those expeditions have been coordinated by Druckenmiller, a scientist with a mountain climber’s body. Somewhat like the fictional Indiana Jones, he is a professor at UAF during the winter and extreme wilderness adventurer in the summer, cliff-climbing, racing tides, slogging through mud and rain, hiking through snowfields, bouncing in small boats through chilly fog on remote rivers and, when things really get bad, hunkering in a wet, overcrowded tent for days at a time.
It’s a far cry from traditional dinosaur hunters who have made headlines and history in the Badlands of the Dakotas, the parched, sunny prairies of the American and Canadian west or the Gobi Desert.
“Coming to Alaska is a different world,” Druckenmiller said. “You can’t drive to your sites. Everything is a challenge -- the weather, the environment, the cost. I went from driving a truck to the work and spending the day in my shorts and a T-shirt to a place where I wear long underwear all summer long.”
A field tent is among the displays in the “Expedition Alaska” exhibit. A film showing in the new museum theater in conjunction with the exhibit includes documentary footage of crews working at Alaska digs as well as information about the latest scientific thinking regarding prehistoric Alaska. The footage has scenes of sodden, weary volunteers packed together, waiting for a meal concocted from Spam and noodles while rain pounds down outside the tent flap.
But such downtime is rare, Druckenmiller said, even something of a luxury. “No matter the weather,” he said with a slight shudder, “we work.”
At least those who can stick it out do. Not everyone is attuned to such adventures. Druckenmiller said he’s made the mistake of signing up people who can’t handle the rigors of an Alaska expedition. That can be a serious issue when transportation in and out of a wilderness location is tenuous and expensive.
“When I’m interviewing someone for a crew, I don’t ask so much about what they’ve studied or how much they know about biology or who their teachers were,” he said. “I ask questions like: How much camping have you done? Are you OK riding in small boats? Can you sleep on cold ground? Do you like Spam?”
And, he might add, how strong is your back?
Druckenmiller pointed to a big specimen of bone and rock wrapped in the foil and plaster “jacket” used to protect fossils in transport. It appeared to be about 150 pounds, not much different from Druckenmiller’s own wiry weight. “I had to pack that out by myself,” he said. “It nearly killed me.”
Tracks ‘like potatoes’
Druckenmiller, 48, developed an omnivorous interest in natural history as a boy. “I was always interested in one thing or another, bugs, birds, plants.”
He was studying botany at the University of Wisconsin in Madison when a trip to a geology collection triggered his curiosity about fossil plants. A friend studying vertebrae paleontology suggested they team up on a field trip to the ancient seabeds of west Kansas. He became intrigued by marine reptiles in those formations and went on to graduate studies in Montana and Calgary, Canada, eventually taking a position at the Museum of the Rockies in Bozeman, Montana.
In 2007 he came to the Museum of the North at a time when the importance and abundance of Alaska fossils was becoming increasingly clear to the academic world. Scientists investigating the vast and, in paleontological terms, largely unexplored country were identifying new species of dinosaurs, marine reptiles and other extinct life forms. Massive trackways in Denali and along the Yukon revealed that the land of ice and snow had once hosted large dinosaur populations.
The amount of material discovered in recent years has been mind-boggling.
“We’ve only had two seasons on the Yukon so far,” Druckenmiller said. “We didn’t know about it until a couple of years ago. They don’t even have a name for the geological formation yet.”
In one span of 10 minutes the team working near Kaltag counted more than 100 tracks.
“I have never seen such a rich track site on any of my journeys to paleontological sites around the world,” Jørn Hurum of the University of Oslo Natural History Museum told the Museum of the North’s spokeswoman, Theresa Bakker. “We were picking sandstone casts of tracks like others pick potatoes.”
“People must have been walking by these tracks for years, for centuries, as long as there have been people there,” said Druckenmiller. “But they didn’t know what they were.”
The consistent shape of a dinosaur track, rather like a large chicken footprint, is easy to spot once it has been pointed out. But a layman could easily think it nothing more than an odd natural pattern.
The museum’s explorers found tracks of large and small plant eaters and meat eaters. Sauropods like the huge, long-necked Diplodocus; ornithopods like duck-billed Hadrosaurs; theropods like Tyrannosaurus. All stunning evidence, Druckenmiller said, “of an extinct ecosystem we never knew existed.”
The Troodon’s tooth