UPDATE: April 27, 2009: Sleeping just three hours over the last four days, Tyler Fish ’96 and John Huston reached the North Pole on April 25, 2009, becoming the first Americans to ski unsupported to the pole.

The final days were an “absolute blur,” said Huston in the final blog. “We pushed our bodies and minds to the limits to overcome seemingly insurmountable odds…. We are exhausted…. We have a fantastic feeling of satisfaction — and of freedom from our powerful routine that propelled us to the North Pole.”

April 22, 2009: Fish ’96, Huston have just days to reach North Pole

Facing an April 25 deadline, Tyler Fish ’96 of Ely, Minn., and John Huston of Chicago are making a final dash to the North Pole.

Hoping to become the first Americans to ski unsupported — no food drops, no outside help — to the pole, the pair are less than 60 nautical miles away.

“We need to make it to the North Pole by [April 25] or we won’t make it,” Fish wrote in the expedition blog, part of the educational and fundraising outreach of the expedition.

“John and I…have been discussing, making plans and doing everything we have to do so we are ready for the final push, which we are now doing.”

• Follow Fish and Huston’s final dash to the North Pole.

Hampering their efforts is the steady drift, south and east, of the Arctic ice beneath their feet. They’ve also lost some time navigating the various “leads” of open water, and are feeling beat down by the harsh Arctic environment.

The April 25 deadline is more than self-imposed. Whether they reach the pole or not, Fish and Huston need to be on the last flight from Camp Borneo, a seasonal Russian station some 60 miles from the pole.

Facing the deadline, the pair have implemented a 27-hour schedule, traveling 17 hours each day and using the rest for sleeping and eating.

The trek began March 2 when the pair left Ellesmere Island and stepped onto the Arctic Ocean sea ice.

Read the article on Arctic research included in Polar Research in Tromsø here.

In Kongsfjorden on the west side of Svalbard, Will Ambrose (facing) and Kelton McMahon ’05 haul a dredge to collect Serripes groenlandicus and other clam species for McMahon’s thesis in 2004. Photograph by Glenn Lopez, SUNY–Stony Brook.

Professor Will Ambrose, a bearded biologist specializing in Arctic sea-floor ecology, is a pioneer in the science of deciphering the past — including past climates — by studying the annual hard-tissue accretions of organisms such as mollusks.

As an expert in sclerochronology, Ambrose has discovered a link between Arctic clam growth and regular shifts in the region’s climate. In short, Arctic clams grow more rapidly during regimes of warm and wet weather and less during cold and dry regimes. This sensitivity to climate change, says Ambrose, makes the humble bivalve a “sentinel of climate change.”

While Ambrose is collaborating on no fewer than five clamshell research projects at the moment, the scientific paper that detailed the initial findings of a correlation between climate change and Arctic clamshells appeared in Global Change Biology in September 2006.

Seen here is the cross section of a small portion of aSerripes groenlandicus shell, near the umbo, or hinge. The lines indicate annual growth: dark lines for slow winter growth; light areas indicate fast summer growth. For an image showing the complete shell, click the image above. Will Ambrose has discovered a correlation between growth and climate shifts. This image is a composite of 18 images produced by the College’s new Imaging and Computing Center using a Nikon SMZ 1500 stereo microscope. Collected in 1926, the shell’s actual length is 2.5 inches.

The paper emerged from work done three years earlier, when Ambrose dispatched divers to the bottom of a high Arctic fjord in the Svalbard archipelago, a popular Arctic research site about halfway between the Norwegian mainland and the North Pole. From the ocean bottom, the divers returned with four Greenland cockles (Serripes groenlandicus).

After encasing the shells in epoxy and slicing them apart, Ambrose and a team of scientists, including Kelton McMahon ’05, analyzed the growth bands. First, the team found that growth bands were indeed deposited annually. Then the team was able to correlate annual differences in shell growth with a measurement of Arctic weather oscillations known as the Arctic Climate Regime Index.

“What makes the work exciting,” says Ambrose, interviewed in his cluttered office on Carnegie’s third floor, “is that this is the first time in the Arctic that we’ve been able to track a large-scale climatic oscillation and see that large-scale regional event reflected in animals living on the bottom.”

While scientists have for decades analyzed growth lines in shells (Ambrose and others call them “trees of the sea”) in order to reconstruct past environments, the intensity around climate-change research has “really made the field of sclerochronology take off,” he says.

In this hot field, Ambrose’s research is distinctive for its location, on the Arctic continental shelf. “A lot of the work has been done at lower latitudes, mostly because it’s harder to get clams in the Arctic and there are simply fewer people available to help,” he says. “That’s why we’re ahead of the ball.”

If it’s true that Arctic clams grow faster in warmer weather (and grow faster when there’s less of a seasonal ice pack, another signal that Ambrose saw hints of), a simplistic response might be, “Great — fatter clams for walruses to munch on.” But, explains Ambrose, fat clams won’t offset the problems walruses are having due to less pack ice to rest on. And less ice will also affect tiny creatures inside the ice that are the first link in a food chain for polar cod, seabirds, and seals. And so on, throughout the Arctic food web.

These Serripes groenlandicus clams were collected in Storfjord at a site last visited by 19th-century Russian explorers. Photograph by Greg Henkes '08.

In the end, changes in water temperature and salinity (due to runoff from melting glaciers) and increased sea levels, leading to erosion and turbidity, will all take their toll on the Arctic ecology. “Ecosystems operate at the interface of physics, chemistry, and biology, with both complementary and contradictory interactions,” Ambrose writes in a forthcoming article predicting that “regional, and perhaps global, biodiversity will suffer.”

Until recently, Ambrose researched other organisms of the benthic community, such as bloodworms along Maine’s coast. A simple matter of funding helped bring bivalves into focus, as a Bates grant (from the Philip J. Otis Endowment) and an external one (from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute) helped purchase a pricey Isomet low-speed saw for preparing shell cross-sections. “Very expensive,” Ambrose says.

In researching the biological response of Arctic bivalves to climate change, Ambrose has depended on the interests and expertise of colleagues and students at Bates and abroad.

Geology professor Beverly Johnson, for example, has been invaluable in co-advising biology students so they can learn to use the College’s stable isotope ratio mass spectrometer, a tool to help identify the age and origins of molecules in various materials. Johnson herself has used the instrument to look at amino acids in dinosaur eggs, and it can likewise be used to tease out the chemical components of clamshells.

“I work with Will to understand how modern systems work,” says Johnson, “and then go back to old shells, using the geochemistry of shells from 125,000 years ago to reconstruct the environment.”

Ambrose also depends on Matt Duvall, who directs Bates’ new Imaging Center, to create elegant microscopic images of his clamshell sections that Ambrose calls “just incredible.”

Geology professor Mike Retelle, another Svalbard regular who specializes in reconstructing climates from lake sediments, has collaborated with Ambrose on researching climate-change information from fossilized Ice Age clams.

Beyond the sciences, Ambrose, Johnson, and Retelle belong to an informal North Atlantic Study Group on campus that also includes archeologists Gerald Bigelow and Bruce Bourque, historian Michael Jones, and political scientist Áslaug Ásgeirsdóttir. What started informal — an interdisciplinary coffee klatsch — has given rise to “North Atlantic Studies,” a thematic grouping of Bates courses, known as a concentration, under the College’s new general education requirements. “We represent an area of study, rather than just a bunch of us sitting around having coffee,” Ambrose says.

“It’s a truly special group,” Retelle adds. “The richness of discussion is such that the boundaries between disciplines disappear. The walls of the box dissolve. Will is a big part of that. As a model for an undergraduate institution, Will has really raised the bar.”

Ambrose himself is quick to point out that “students here are the ones driving the bus in terms of getting the work done.” As he speaks, Greg Henkes ’08 of Chapel Hill, N.C., is downstairs in the environmental geochemistry lab cutting shells and extracting organic material. Henkes’ senior thesis involves a study of 130 years of climate change in the Barents Sea and Svalbard using a historic Russian collection of Serripes groenlandicus. He will present his findings to an American Geophysical Union conference in San Francisco.

Greg Henkes ’08, one of Will Ambrose’s thesis students, took this photograph at 3 a.m. on June 3, 2007, as the research shipLance heads through sea ice in Storfjord in the Svalbard archipelago, about halfway between the North Pole and Norway.

“It’s pretty incredible to be able to do this at Bates,” says Henkes. “It’s the way science is going,” says Ambrose of the collaborative nature of scientific enquiry, noting his international partnerships with colleagues at the Norwegian Polar Institute and the research firm Akvaplan-niva. “People aren’t doing their own little thing anymore.”

“That’s the way science should be done,” emphasizes Kelton McMahon, co-author of the Serripes groenlandicus paper. “In certain circles, it is. But a lot of people come from departments that don’t share data because they feel funding is in direct competition. Bates takes a very progressive approach to interdisciplinary research.”

McMahon is now working on his Ph.D. in a program co-sponsored by MIT and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. His contribution to the clamshell research has been to use two gizmos — a New Wave Research UP213 laser ablation system coupled to a Thermo Finnigan Element 2 single collector field inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometer — to measure the chemical components of shell samples. Ambrose et al. used changes in the ratio of strontium to calcium to establish that the external lines of the Greenland cockleshells were, in fact, annual growth lines. “If it wasn’t for Kelton getting us access to those machines,” says Ambrose, “the paper wouldn’t have been anywhere near as good.”

As he sits in his Carnegie office discussing his work — Ambrose also hopes to extend his sclerochronology research to coral in part because “they live much longer than clams” — he is eagerly awaiting a new shipment of Svalbard shells that he hopes will solve a quirk in his findings. Until recent years, Ambrose found that annual clam growth was high in years when the extent of Arctic ice pack, as measured each March, was low. But over the last several years, “growth didn’t track ice cover the way it did before. Something happened, but we’re not sure what,” he says. “Are the last four years unnatural? That’s why I want those new clams. It’s another four years of data that will help establish some baselines.” And baselines will help provide more answers, which will probably just beget more questions. It’s the wayscientific inquiry works. “People like simple answers,” Ambrose says. “Nature doesn’t.”

By Edgar Allen Beem

Freelance writer Edgar Allen Beem wrote about the College’s sustainability initiatives in the Fall 2007 issue of Bates Magazine.

Michael J. Retelle, a professor of geology at Bates, is one of 13 scientists across the nation to share nearly $1,500,000 in National Science Foundation funding for Arctic research related to global climate change.

The NSF funds, awarded for a four-year period beginning March 1, support an ongoing project to create a 2,000-year climatic history of the North American Arctic. The researchers are analyzing layers of sediment deposited annually upon Arctic lake beds for clues to climatic conditions during the past two millennia, clues such as sediment thickness and chemical composition.

The NSF grant totals $1,476,442, of which Retelle’s share is $50,190. That money will defray costs of analyzing six lake-floor core samples that Retelle collected in 2003 from lakes on Devon, Cornwallis and Bathurst islands, near Greenland in Canada’s Nunavut Territory. Retelle and three students (including Dan Frost, a senior from Farmington, Maine) will process the samples this summer.

Titled “Collaborative Research: A Synthesis of the Last 2,000 Years of Climatic Variability from Arctic Lakes,” the NSF-funded project is intended to provide a context for better understanding of current climatic trends. “It’s important to try to put the recent climatic warming in a longer-term perspective, and to try to tease out whether what we’re looking at is part of the range of natural variability or, indeed, if it’s a result of human alteration of the atmosphere,” Retelle explains.

“The further we can go back and see how the natural system works, the better we can put this recent warming into context and try to understand what’s controlling it.”

Analyzing core samples from 30 lakes across a region of the North American Arctic from Alaska to the northwest Atlantic, the researchers will integrate their results of their work and, they hope, be able to announce findings by 2007. The project extends a 400-year Arctic climatic history project whose results were widely publicized in 1997.

Retelle explains that, as records (or “proxies,” in scientific parlance) of the weather from year to year, layers of lake sediment can be likened to tree-growth rings. Thicker layers can signify warmer summers that promoted plant growth in the lake or rainstorms that washed soil into the lake. Also informative are levels of carbon, nitrogen and substances like biogenic silica, a hard remnant of algae.

Retelle and his assistants will analyze the samples through a variety of means, including an X-ray fluorescence spectroscopy system at the University of Laval, Quebec.

Climate is a central theme of Retelle’s work, and in nearly 30 years’ worth of visits to the Arctic, he has seen climate-related changes that he calls “actually frightening.” He points to Ellesmere Island, 480 miles from the North Pole, where floating coastal ice shelves have receded dramatically and lake ice that once persisted year-round is now seasonal. “There are radical changes,” he says.

The grant is the latest in a series of NSF awards that Retelle has received for Arctic lake-bed study and for bringing students into this research. (More than 20 of Retelle’s students have conducted research in the Canadian Arctic for senior thesis projects.) He has done geological research in the Arctic since 1976, when he worked as a field geologist and engineer on the Trans-Alaska Pipeline.

Retelle, of Monmouth, has worked at Bates since 1987. His teaching and research are focused on geological events of the past 1,600,000 years — called the Quaternary Period — and specifically ancient environmental records from glacial, lake and marine sediments in Maine as well as the Canadian arctic.

Here in Maine, with Thomas Weddle of the Maine Geological Survey, Retelle has published findings from an ongoing survey on the impacts of the retreat from Maine of Ice Age glaciers, including changes in sea level. He also works with students in assessing seasonal effects of weather at the Bates-Morse Mountain Conservation Area, Phippsburg.

Retelle is a senior researcher for the Svalbard Research Experience for Undergraduates, a summer project funded by the NSF and hosted by Mount Holyoke College, that brings six students to the Norwegian Arctic to research the effects of climate change upon high-latitude glaciers, melt-water streams and sedimentation in lakes and fjords.

He graduated with a bachelor’s degree in earth sciences from Salem (Mass.) State College, and earned graduate degrees in geology at the University of Massachusetts.

Titled Experiencing the Summer Solstice on the Arctic Ice, Richard’s presentation is open to the public free of charge.

A writer, registered Maine Guide and adventure tour organizer, Richard will discuss images from trips to Ramah Bay, in Labrador, and to the edge of the Arctic ice near the eastern entrance of the Northwest Passage. The slides will show wildlife, dramatic land- and seascapes, and human settlements current and abandoned.

Last fall, Richard was central to a Bates-Chewonki Foundation symposium on the Arctic that concentrated on Canada’s Nunavut territory. In autumn 2002, Richard taught “Perceptions of Place and Time — High Altitude Bioregions” at Bates. Designed to develop students’ skills of perception, the seminar combined classroom work with field trips as far afield as the Gaspé Peninsula.

At the same time, Richard exhibited images of Maine and the polar regions at the Bates College Museum of Art. He has also shown his photography at Chewonki, the Chocolate Church, L.L. Bean, Maine Audubon, the Maine State House, Bowdoin College’s Peary-MacMillan Arctic Museum and the University of New England.