SCIENCE ROUDNUP: New bee species discovered in Alaska

There’s a newly-discovered bumblebee in town: Bombus (Alpinobumbus) kluanensis.

Alpinobumbus is Latin for the subgenus of Bombus (bumblebee) that refers to circumpolar Arctic bumblebees. Kluanensis is a species of Arctic bumblebee with a special distinction: it is the first new bumblebee species to be discovered in North America in nearly 90 years.

The new species, described in the Journal of Natural History article, “Cryptic subarctic diversity: a new bumblebee species from the Yukon and Alaska,” is one of 4,459 Arctic bumblebees in the world, according to the study’s authors.

Kluanensis ranges from Denali National Park in Alaska near the Alaska Range, to the St. Elias Range in Canada. Genetic mapping, along with physical description, helped researchers identify kluanensis as a distinct species.

“North American bumblebee species are relatively well known compared to bumblebee species in other parts of the world,” the researchers, Paul Williams, Sydney Cannings and Cory Sheffield, wrote.

“The last time a bumblebee species entirely unrecognized by science was described from the USA or Canada was by Frison (1927).”

Advanced mapping helps trace history

of Matanuska-Knik Glacier system

As the world warms and most glaciers beat a hasty retreat, what can we expect will happen to local glaciers in the future?

To help address that question, a team of researchers from four universities, along with Sarah Kopczynski at the Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory in Alaska, used advanced mapping techniques to peer into the past of the Matanuska-Knick Glacier system.

The study area stretched from the Talkeetna Mountains in the north, down to the Chugach Mountains in the South, and west to the Knik Arm.

Researchers used previous geomorphic mapping data – that’s mapping of the shape of a landscape – and combined it with additional mapping from Alaska Geospatial Data Clearinghouse, that relies on digital orthoimagery, along with other high-resolution imagery. Digital orthoimagery is a special type of high-resolution aerial photography image.

Compiling and combining massive data sets is an increasingly-used big-data tool that helps scientists gain new insights into research questions.

The research team also conducted field research, including collecting pebble samples from 131 sites and analyzing their geological makeup to better understand historic paths where glaciers have moved and deposited rocks. That ended up coming to a lot of pebbles – 16,920 pebbles, to be exact. Additional field studies for collecting geologic data included radiocarbon-dated lake sediment cores, surveys for geologic rock types, and collection of 200 samples of marine deposits.

The team found that the Knik Valley is home to deposits only of rocks from the Chugach Mountains, while the Matanuska Valley contains deposits from both the Chugach and Talkeetna Mountains, indicating two main glacial sources and movement patterns. Although glaciers over water appear to have retreated in a distinct pattern compared to glaciers over land, the total Matanuska-Knik glacier system appears to have retreated in two distinct phases, according to the study results. The second, shorter phase began 14,900 years ago. It took another 1,200 years for the Matanuska Valley glacial ice to recede 70 kilometers -- or about 46 and a half miles -- before resting at a pause.

The research project provides a history of the Matanuska-Knik glacier system, but it also places it in context with pre-existing data for other glacier systems .

“Our findings demonstrate that late glacial events in the Anchorage Lowland are not an isolated Alaskan phenomenon,” the study authors wrote. “Rather, they contribute to a growing data set, which cumulatively supports the notion that major glacial terminations are globally driven events,” the study’s authors note.

The study, “Latest Pleistocene advance and collapse of the Matanuska-Knik glacier system, Anchorage Lowland, southern Alaska,” was published in the Dec. 2016 issue of Quaternary Science Reviews.

Funding for the study came from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Geological Society of America, U.S. Geological Survey, and university programs. William Stevenson of Alaska Outfitters gave fieldwork consultation to the research team.

New report addresses economic impacts

of climate change on Alaska

Global climate change might not sound too bad to some Alaskans – what’s the problem with warmer average annual temperatures when you live in a place where ice forms on your lashes some days?

But there are some potential downsides. It’s hard to be cheerful about melting permafrost when road systems and lengths of pipeline are built over them, and thermal rods to protect the frozen ground underneath only works up to a limited range of temperature warming. As if that wasn’t enough, all that melting permafrost causes flooding, which can damage nearby buildings.

And, infrastructure damage costs money to tangle with. A new study published in the January 2017 issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences attempts to quantify what that damage will amount to for Alaska over the next century.

The study, “Climate change damages to Alaska public infrastructure and the economics of proactive adaptation,” recommends a “proactive” approach to climate change that begins with estimating the costs involved.

The projection, a data-based estimate, goes for the long view – all the way out to the year 2100.

The multiple-scenario projections put the damage estimate for Alaska public infrastructure – so, not including private – in a range from $4.2 billion to $5.5 billion in 2015 dollars.

The full report is free to the public and available online at http://www.pnas.org/content/114/2/E122.full