Photo of the Month Ketchikan: Public Meetings Ketchikan: Upcoming Events Historical Ketchikan June Allen Dave Kiffer Louise B. Harrington Ketchikan Weather Ketchikan's Forecast Ketchikan's Historic Weather Nat Weather Service KTN Ketchikan Tides & Currents Search the News Ketchikan Alaska Sitnews RSS widget

Feature: Seward's Folly: Celebrating the Alaska Purchase By JUNE ALLEN - On March 30, 2017, we celebrated the 150th anniversary of the Alaska purchase.

William Henry Seward
4th United States Secretary of State - In office
March 5, 1861 – March 4, 1869

It was at the end of March 1867 that the sale of Russia's possessions on the far northwest shoulder of North America was negotiated. It was a curious transaction in that the sellers didn't particularly want to sell and the buyers were not all that interested in purchasing such a huge, seemingly worthless chunk of real estate. And even at the successful end of the negotiations between representatives of the two nations, the United States Senate approved the purchase of Alaska by only a single vote! It was the popular and powerful Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts who eased the passage of the treaty allowing the sale - and who also suggested that the nameless frozen properties in the North Pacific be named "Alaska."

It was two years after the close of the War Between the States and the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln that the Purchase of Alaska was engineered. At the time, Washington D.C. was a springtime quagmire of muddy and rutted, manure-fouled streets. Men carried side arms and spat tobacco juice. The seemingly lawless nation's capital still wore the in-progress look of a "created" community, the progress halted by the empty coffers of a country devastated by a long and costly civil war.

The two men who engineered the Alaska Purchase, U.S. Secretary of State William Henry Seward and Russian diplomat Edouard de Stoeckl - couldn't have been more different.

William Henry Seward had been Secretary of State under President Lincoln - against whom he ran unsuccessfully for the presidential nomination in 1860. After Lincoln's assassination, Seward remained as Secretary of State under President Andrew Johnson.

Seward was born to a wealthy family in New York state, became a lawyer like his judge father, and entered politics at a young age, becoming a two-term governor of New York before he exercised his presidential ambitions. As Lincoln's "right hand," he was said to have been an effective secretary of state.

Seward's most notable physical characteristic was his large "noble" nose, which he himself may have considered handsome. A proud and full profile photograph of him hangs in the Seward, Alaska, museum. In life, his nose definitely preceded him! He had a distinctive upper lip, an abundant head of hair, a passionate nature for causes, and a fierce determination.

His face carried the scars of an assassin's attack from the evening of April 14, 1865, when Abraham Lincoln was killed at Ford's Theater. Lincoln's assassination by renowned actor John Wilkes Booth was not a solo act but was a part of a much larger plot to kill the president, the Vice-President, the Secretary of State, the Secretary of War and perhaps others. However, some of the assigned assassins were less determined or trustworthy than others. The vice-president's assigned assassin got drunk to screw up his courage and passed out before he could act. The spared war secretary's potential assassin was never identified, a fact that fueled rumors that perhaps it was the Secretary of War himself who sponsored the deadly plans! - More...
Monday PM - April 03, 2017

Pacific NW: 'Whale breath' reveals bacteria threatening endangered killer whales - Droplets and exhaled breath caught from the blowholes of killer whales along the Pacific coast are providing scientists with insights into whale health and revealing bacteria and fungi that may be a threat to the mammals.

Droplets and exhaled breath caught from the blowholes of killer whales along the Pacific coast are providing scientists with insights into whale health.
Photo credit: Pete Schroeder

"We wanted to find out what sort of bacteria and fungi represent in healthy whales and the potential pathogens they are being exposed to in their environment," said Stephen Raverty, the lead author on the study and an adjunct professor at UBC's Institute for the Oceans and Fisheries. "In some circumstances, these pathogenic microbes could pose a threat to the animals and contribute to clinical disease."

A group of fish-eating killer whales, known as southern resident killer whales, are an endangered species that live in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of California north to the Salish Sea off the western coast of British Columbia. Over the course of one decade in the 1990s, their numbers dropped from about 108 animals to about 70. Some of the threats to whales include changes to their habitat like increased shipping traffic, noise, contaminants, and less prey. But these factors alone do not explain why the whale population hasn't recovered. - More...
Monday PM - April 03, 2017

Arctic: Solving the mystery of the Arctic's green ice - In 2011, researchers observed something that should be impossible -- a massive bloom of phytoplankton growing under Arctic sea ice in conditions that should have been far too dark for anything requiring photosynthesis to survive. So, how was this bloom possible?

Using mathematical modeling, researchers from the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) found that thinning Arctic sea ice may be responsible for these blooms and more blooms in the future, potentially causing significant disruption in the Arctic food chain. 

The research is described in Science Advances and is a collaboration between researchers from SEAS, University of Oxford and University of Reading. 

Phytoplankton underpins the entire Arctic food web. Every summer, when the sea ice retreats, sunlight hitting the open water triggers a massive bloom of plankton. These plumes attract fish, which attract larger predators and provides food for indigenous communities living in the Arctic. 

Phytoplankton shouldn't be able to grow under the ice because ice reflects most sunlight light back into space, blocking it from reaching the water below. 

But over the past decades, Arctic ice has gotten darker and thinner due to warming temperatures, allowing more and more sunlight to penetrate to the water beneath. Large, dark pools of water on the surface of the ice, known as melt ponds, have increased, lowering the reflectivity of the ice. The ice that remains frozen is thin and getting thinner. 

"Our big question was, how much sunlight gets transmitted through the sea ice, both as a function of thickness, which has been decreasing, and the melt pond percentage, which has been increasing," said Chris Horvat, first author of the paper and graduate student in applied mathematics at SEAS. "What we found was that we went from a state where there wasn't any potential for plankton blooms to massive regions of the Arctic being susceptible to these types of growth." - More...
Monday PM - April 03, 2017

COLUMNS - COMMENTARY

Not a surprising response to the idea that President Trump might embrace Democrats lobbying for a "Medicare for All" universal health care plan.

"I'm a contractor. I'm a Republican," the caller offered on my radio program.

Okay, so that part was a surprise.

A safety net for disabled Americans and people over 65 years old, you pay a little in and you get health insurance coverage.Want more coverage?Buy a Medicare supplement policy.

Medicare polls well, too, though most Americans do realize it's a strain on the federal budget.What they may not know is just how much of a strain that is.

Already 15 percent of the federal budget and rising, Medicare is getting more expensive every year. - More...
Monday PM - April 03, 2017

TOM PURCELL: Rural Folks Living What 'Preppers' Seek - Get this: More people are fleeing big cities for rural areas and some are doing so because they fear a major financial collapse is imminent.

According to U.S. Census Bureau estimates, big cities are losing population at a rapid clip. Chicago's Cook County saw 66,000 people move out in 2016.

Many of these people are moving to rural areas in the Northwest and elsewhere. The Chicago Tribune explains that a growing number of them are survivalists who seek homes that they can defend in the event that a collapse occurs.

Lucky for me, I already have a rural homestead outside of Pittsburgh. I bought the modest fixer-upper 20 years ago. It sits high on a big piece of ground near a small town I shall refer to as Hickberry.

My father and I did some basic renovations to make it livable. I lived in it for a few years, then rented it out to live the high life in Washington, D.C. I moved back to the house five years ago and am almost done with a total rehab.

But here's one thing I learned along the way: The people in metro Washington are way different from the good-natured people of Hickberry.

You see, D.C. is populated with thousands of people with master's degrees, who rely on other people to feed them and keep them sheltered when it is raining. If something calamitous goes down, they won't have any idea how to survive.

Unlike the sophisticated folks in Washington, however, my Hickberry neighbors are resourceful and clever. They rely on no man. - More...
Monday PM - April 03, 2017