BLM Research Camp

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Dennis Green, Alaska 2002drexgreen@gmail.com

The Camp Seal Group

Ancient ForestFisheries Group

Established in 1976, this simple field facility hosts scientists and researchers from all over the world, academic, private, and governmental.

Studies in the fields of glaciology, botany, animal biology, geology, and geography are conducted at one of most unique and remarkable locations on the planet. The monstrous Bering Glacier is the largest flowing river of ice outside Greenland and the polar icecaps -126 miles long and 30 miles wide. Situated on Vitus Lake, the camp accommodates a residency of up to 36 scientists, students, and support staff each week between the Alaska summer months of June and August.

The Camp

The week of these images, two University of Alaska research teams made the camp their headquarters. The Seal Team was not called so because they trained in the Navy (although, they were experienced in

frigid water safety and wore matching attire), but for the sea creature they studied – the harbor seal. Each morning they set sail their blowup Zodiac boats into Vitus Lake to net, heave, drag to shore, straddle, tranquilize, tag, weigh, poke, perform pinniped enemas, then discharge harbor seals. To a seal, a wild ride molestation. Regretfully, do to poor weather I was not able to photograph this radical seal/human experience.

Seal Group

This young Ph.D. fisheries student and her associate studied finned populations in the surrounding lakes and ponds. Her subjects faired better than the seals, that is, until the end:

Small fish swim innocently into aluminum traps with no exit—no exit to a fish brain—collected the next day then pickled in formaldehyde. Such is their cost to our science.

Each day the dedicated helicopter transported the team to distant lake shores that, perhaps because of the ever changing nature of the Bering Glacier topography, were never before touched by human feet.

Fisheries Group

Habitually, a glacier pulverizes anything underneath it. But an exception has scientists excited and mystified. Dubbed the “Ancient Forest”, it is a hollow of land just recently exposed by the retreating Bering

Glacier. Within a bowl the size of a neighborhood football lot rests, still rooted, the stump remains of large Sitka spruce and cottonwoods. Protected by the Bering Glacier since 200-400 AD, fragile pine needles, delicate grasses, and preserved peat moss surround. To add to the puzzle, a violent force tore off the tree’s torsos and crowns leaving only frayed stubs, which now all point like justice-conscious victims toward their killer’s southwest exit.

Ancient Forest

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