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1. A passive acoustic survey for marine mammals conducted during the 2019 Antarctic voyage on Euphausiids and Nutrient Recycling in Cetacean Hotspots (ENRICH)

   Miller, Brian S ; Calderan, Susannah ; Miller, Elanor J. ; Širović, Ana ; Stafford, Kathleen M. ; Bell, Elanor ; Double, Michael C. ( January 2019 , Proceedings of ACOUSTICS 2019)

   The 2019 ENRICH Voyage (Euphausiids and Nutrient Recycling in Cetacean Hotspots), was conducted from 19 January – 5 March 2019, aboard the RV Investigator. The voyage departed from and returned to Hobart, Tasma-nia, Australia, and conducted most marine science operations in the area between 60°S – 67°S and 138°E – 152°E. As part of the multidisciplinary research programme, a passive acoustic survey for marine mammals was undertaken for the duration of the voyage, with the main goal to monitor for and locate groups of calling Antarctic blue whales (Balaenoptera musculus intermedia). Directional sonobuoys were used at 295 listening stations, which resulted in 828 hours of acoustic recordings. Monitoring also took place for pygmy blue, (B. m. brevicauda), fin, (B. physalus), sperm (Physeter macrocephalus), humpback (Megaptera novaeangliae), sei (B. borealis), and Antarctic minke whales (B. bonarensis); for leopard (Hydrurga leptonyx), crabeater (Lobodon carcinophaga), Ross (Ommatophoca rossii), and Weddell seals (Leptonychotes weddellii), and for odontocete (low frequency whistles) vocalisations during each listening station. Calibrated measurements of the bearing and intensity of the majority of calls from blue and fin whales were obtained in real time. 33,435 calls from Antarctic blue whales were detected at 238 listening stations throughout the voyage, most of them south of 60°S. Southeast Indian Ocean blue whale song was detected primarily between 47° and 55°S while the southwest Pacific blue whale song was recorded between 44° and 48°S. Most baleen whale and seal calls were detected along the continental shelf break in the study region but some were also detected in deeper waters. Marine mammal calls were uncommon on the shelf, which did not have any ice cover during the survey. Calling Antarctic blue whales were tracked and located on multiple occasions to enable closer study of their fine-scale movements and calling behaviour as well as enabling collection of photo ID, behavioural, and photogrammetry data. The passive acoustic data collected during this voyage will allow investigation of the distribution of Antarctic blue whales in relation to environmental correlates measured during ENRICH, with a focus on blue whale prey. 

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2. In Pursuit of Understanding, a Career in Marine Geology

   https://doi.org/10.1029/2022CN000160  

   Moore, Jr., Theodore C. ( July 2022 , Perspectives of Earth and Space Scientists)

   My interest in the oceans first developed when I was a teenager, but I did not actually go to sea until I was in the U.S. Navy. With that experience, I developed a love of the oceans and an interest in oceanography. My graduate training was a time when oceanography and marine geology were blossoming with new ideas and new tools to explore the ocean world. The theory of plate tectonics was becoming widely accepted and scientific ocean drilling was just starting. My thesis study area was in the tropical Pacific. Soon after receiving my PhD, I sailed on Deep Sea Drilling Project Leg 8, which drilled the first transect across the Pacific equator. The nature of the sediments there posed many scientific questions that continued to intrigue me. Some of these questions remained unanswered for a long time. Early in my career I was fortunate to work with a group of specialists from outside my field of expertise to study the global climate during the last glacial maximum (the CLIMAP Project). Subsequently, I spent 8 years working in the oil industry. This experience taught me the skills of interpreting seismic reflection records that help unravel the history of sediment deposition. When I returned to academia, these skills proved particularly useful in studies of large lakes. Late in my career, I returned to studies of the tropical Pacific, where new tools and techniques helped answer some of my unanswered questions.

    

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3. Maybe it’s good to not have too much focus

   https://doi.org/10.1093/icesjms/fsad168  

   Pechenik, Jan A. ; Browman, ed., Howard ( November 2023 , ICES Journal of Marine Science)

   I had no idea what I was getting into when I decided to go into marine biology as a graduate student. It has ended up being a wonderful career, with opportunities to work with wonderful people around the world, and to work with many wonderful students at a variety of grade levels. It has also opened up opportunities in completely unexpected directions and allowed me to explore a good variety of research questions, explore a variety of teaching methods at a variety of grade levels, write a few books, and even develop some games for middle-school students. Luck has certainly played a role in some of this, but my main advice is to always keep an eye open for opportunities of interest, within and outside of your normal field…and seize them if possible!

    

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4. Making Your Own Luck: A Meaningful Career From Being Open to Opportunities

   https://doi.org/10.1029/2020CN000133  

   Robock, Alan ( August 2020 , Perspectives of Earth and Space Scientists)

   The most important work I have done in my career is to warn the world about the dangers of nuclear weapons. While the Soviet‐American nuclear arms race has ended, and the 2017 United Nations Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons is on its way to ratification, there is still much more work to do. The smoke from fires ignited by nuclear weapons would block out the Sun, cooling Earth's surface. The United States and Russia can still produce a nuclear winter, killing most crops and producing a global famine. I have worked on this because I have been open to new opportunities, have used my scientific expertise to apply to important problems, and am sensitive to issues that present dangers to society. Having spent more than $20 million of the public's money on my research, I feel an obligation to warn society of dangers I discover, and focus on that communication as an intimate part of my scientific efforts. And nuclear winter research has been very good to me. It led to meeting Sherri West (my wife), Carl Sagan, and Fidel Castro; to getting my current job at Rutgers; and to being a participant in the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, which won the 2017 Nobel Peace Prize. Taking advantage of chance encounters at the Fall American Geophysical Union Meetings has been an important factor in this tale.

    

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5. COVID-19 and Housing Security in Remote Alaska Native Communities

   Nicewonger, Todd E. ; McNair, Lisa D. ; Fritz, Stacey ; Supple, Laura ; Criss-Carboy, Laura ( November 2023 , Virginia Tech Publishing)

   Nicewonger, Todd E. ; McNair, Lisa D. ; Fritz, Stacey (Ed.)

   https://pressbooks.lib.vt.edu/alaskanative/ At the start of the pandemic, the editors of this annotated bibliography initiated a remote (i.e., largely virtual) ethnographic research project that investigated how COVID-19 was impacting off-site modular construction practices in Alaska Native communities. Many of these communities are located off the road system and thus face not only dramatically higher costs but multiple logistical challenges in securing licensed tradesmen and construction crews and in shipping building supplies and equipment to their communities. These barriers, as well as the region’s long winters and short building seasons, complicate the construction of homes and related infrastructure projects. Historically, these communities have also grappled with inadequate housing, including severe overcrowding and poor-quality building stock that is rarely designed for northern Alaska’s climate (Marino 2015). Moreover, state and federal bureaucracies and their associated funding opportunities often further complicate home building by failing to accommodate the digital divide in rural Alaska and the cultural values and practices of Native communities.[1] It is not surprising, then, that as we were conducting fieldwork for this project, we began hearing stories about these issues and about how the restrictions caused by the pandemic were further exacerbating them. Amidst these stories, we learned about how modular home construction was being imagined as a possible means for addressing both the complications caused by the pandemic and the need for housing in the region (McKinstry 2021). As a result, we began to investigate how modular construction practices were figuring into emergent responses to housing needs in Alaska communities. We soon realized that we needed to broaden our focus to capture a variety of prefabricated building methods that are often colloquially or idiomatically referred to as “modular.” This included a range of prefabricated building systems (e.g., manufactured, volumetric modular, system-built, and Quonset huts and other reused military buildings[2]). Our further questions about prefabricated housing in the region became the basis for this annotated bibliography. Thus, while this bibliography is one of multiple methods used to investigate these issues, it played a significant role in guiding our research and helped us bring together the diverse perspectives we were hearing from our interviews with building experts in the region and the wider debates that were circulating in the media and, to a lesser degree, in academia. The actual research for each of three sections was carried out by graduate students Lauren Criss-Carboy and Laura Supple.[3] They worked with us to identify source materials and their hard work led to the team identifying three themes that cover intersecting topics related to housing security in Alaska during the pandemic. The source materials collected in these sections can be used in a variety of ways depending on what readers are interested in exploring, including insights into debates on housing security in the region as the pandemic was unfolding (2021-2022). The bibliography can also be used as a tool for thinking about the relational aspects of these themes or the diversity of ways in which information on housing was circulating during the pandemic (and the implications that may have had on community well-being and preparedness). That said, this bibliography is not a comprehensive analysis. Instead, by bringing these three sections together with one another to provide a snapshot of what was happening at that time, it provides a critical jumping off point for scholars working on these issues. The first section focuses on how modular housing figured into pandemic responses to housing needs. In exploring this issue, author Laura Supple attends to both state and national perspectives as part of a broader effort to situate Alaska issues with modular housing in relation to wider national trends. This led to the identification of multiple kinds of literature, ranging from published articles to publicly circulated memos, blog posts, and presentations. These materials are important source materials that will likely fade in the vastness of the Internet and thus may help provide researchers with specific insights into how off-site modular construction was used – and perhaps hyped – to address pandemic concerns over housing, which in turn may raise wider questions about how networks, institutions, and historical experiences with modular construction are organized and positioned to respond to major societal disruptions like the pandemic. As Supple pointed out, most of the material identified in this review speaks to national issues and only a scattering of examples was identified that reflect on the Alaskan context. The second section gathers a diverse set of communications exploring housing security and homelessness in the region. The lack of adequate, healthy housing in remote Alaska communities, often referred to as Alaska’s housing crisis, is well-documented and preceded the pandemic (Guy 2020). As the pandemic unfolded, journalists and other writers reported on the immense stress that was placed on already taxed housing resources in these communities (Smith 2020; Lerner 2021). The resulting picture led the editors to describe in their work how housing security in the region exists along a spectrum that includes poor quality housing as well as various forms of houselessness including, particularly relevant for the context, “hidden homelessness” (Hope 2020; Rogers 2020). The term houseless is a revised notion of homelessness because it captures a richer array of both permanent and temporary forms of housing precarity that people may experience in a region (Christensen et al. 2107). By identifying sources that reflect on the multiple forms of housing insecurity that people were facing, this section highlights the forms of disparity that complicated pandemic responses. Moreover, this section underscores ingenuity (Graham 2019; Smith 2020; Jason and Fashant 2021) that people on the ground used to address the needs of their communities. The third section provides a snapshot from the first year of the pandemic into how CARES Act funds were allocated to Native Alaska communities and used to address housing security. This subject was extremely complicated in Alaska due to the existence of for-profit Alaska Native Corporations and disputes over eligibility for the funds impacted disbursements nationwide. The resources in this section cover that dispute, impacts of the pandemic on housing security, and efforts to use the funds for housing as well as barriers Alaska communities faced trying to secure and use the funds. In summary, this annotated bibliography provides an overview of what was happening, in real time, during the pandemic around a specific topic: housing security in largely remote Alaska Native communities. The media used by housing specialists to communicate the issues discussed here are diverse, ranging from news reports to podcasts and from blogs to journal articles. This diversity speaks to the multiple ways in which information was circulating on housing at a time when the nightly news and radio broadcasts focused heavily on national and state health updates and policy developments. Finding these materials took time, and we share them here because they illustrate why attention to housing security issues is critical for addressing crises like the pandemic. For instance, one theme that emerged out of a recent National Science Foundation workshop on COVID research in the North NSF Conference[4] was that Indigenous communities are not only recovering from the pandemic but also evaluating lessons learned to better prepare for the next one, and resilience will depend significantly on more—and more adaptable—infrastructure and greater housing security. 

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