Potential Adverse Effects of the Alaska Natural Gas Pipeline on Arctic Caribou and Proposed Mitigation

The Alaska Natural Gas Pipeline (ANGP) is proposed for construction on the North Slope in 2016. It will be aligned through Arctic caribou habitat and evidence shows that caribou are negatively affected by human development. This Capstone identifies potential adverse affects of ANGP on Arctic caribou using interviews from expert caribou biologists and the 1977 Trans-Alaska Pipeline System (TAPS) as a model. Based on a synthesis of the interviews and TAPS analysis, this capstone proposes and examines a set of seventeen conservation measures to be implemented during construction and operation of ANGP to minimize adverse impacts on caribou herds. These conservation measures can be used as a baseline for future developments on the North Slope to promote caribou herd management.

Athapaskan clothing and related objects in the collections of Field Museum of Natural History / James W. VanStone, Curator, North American Archaeology and Ethnology, Dept. of Anthropology, Field Museum of Natural History.

n.s. no.4(1981)

Sulfur-isotope analyses of gypsium samples from the Southeast Greenland margin, southern Alaska and Gulf of Alaska (Table 1)

Gypsum grains were identified in Miocene-Pleistocene sediment cores from two deep-water ODP sites, Site 918 off the SE Greenland margin and Site 887 in the Gulf of Alaska, and in Holocene sediment cores from shallow-water localities in Disenchantment Bay and Muir Inlet in southern Alaska. Although initial morphologic and textural observations suggested a complex system in which the gypsum may have had more than one origin, quantitative sulfur isotope analyses of the gypsum provide evidence of its detrital nature. d34S values in gypsum from southern Alaska range between +0.0 and +7.1 per mil. Gypsum has d34S values between -27.1 and -27.5 per mil in the Gulf of Alaska and values between -28.5 and +0.2 per mil off the SE Greenland margin. All of these isotopic signatures are too highly depleted in d34S to have precipitated from seawater, present or past. In addition there is no significant change in d34S values for gypsum crystals with differing physical characteristics (abraded vs. unabraded) from the same stratigraphic horizon, suggesting all the gypsum is detrital regardless of the degree of abrasion. The isotopic and physical evidence, in combination with the onshore geology the environmental setting, and site characteristics of the gypsum-bearing marine localities, lead us to propose that the ultimate source of the gypsum is precipitation from freeze-induced terrestrial sediment or soil brines. Furthermore the combined evidence suggests that the subsequent occurrence of gypsum in glacimarine sediments results from ice-rafting (by icebergs or sea ice) of the frozen regolith and/or, in the proximal glacimarine setting of southern Alaska, very rapid burial via turbidity currents.