Arctic Urban Legends

An update to a Northwest Passage blogpost posted to the Facebook Rememberig Frankline Expedition group, elicited a response from @aaron.spitzer. I post his comment below, which I thanked him for citing the fact my stories were from conversations that weren't fact-checked. That in turn got me to fact-check another story from the same 1986 summer in the Arctic Islands from my now-defunct original website reposted at bottom.

Map

First, here is the map of the region from the blogpost in question, reprojected in the NWT Albers for better map illustration. It also includes two additional airports mentionned at the bottom. The post was about navigating the Northwest Passage through history, the Arctic Islands dispatch base of Resolute Bay and an extension to New York.

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Comment

This is the comment to the group in question by a Whitehorse YT resident familiar with regional lore: 

I feel like this story confuses and conflates multiple true stories. To challenge Canadian sovereignty, the US *did* send the USS Manhattan oil tanker (not a barge) through the passage in 1969 (not the 1950s). And regarding Resolute's location, it was supposed to have been built farther west IN CANADA (not in Alaska), on Bathurst Island I think, but ice blocked the delivery of materials so they built the station at Resolute instead. This was, I'm pretty sure, part of the JAWS (Joint Arctic Weather Station) project, involving US and Canadian collaboration in the 1950s, so it was 1) well before the discovery of oil led to any development at Prudhoe Bay, and 2) not at all done against Canadian wishes. Also, the US does not "claim" the Northwest Passage. Rather, the US views the Northwest Passage as an international strait over which ALL nations have a "right of transit passage." That right means a nation can pass through between two areas of "high seas." It does NOT mean that a nation can conduct research, fish, build anything, or touch land in any way. Certainly the US does not, and has not ever, asserted a right to build anything in Canadian Arctic. There is not a single morsel of contested land in the entire circumpolar Arctic.

Let me add to these fantastic details, that there are indeed no international waters here: the Exclusive Economic Zone in blue cover the entire Arctic Islands.

Another story

Here is another I posted on my now-defunct original website, returning from the Arctic via Yellowknife:

... Return to Yellowknife, and watch the F-18 jet fighter from the USAF take off in waves... thundering down the runway, tilting nose-up and using the ground (not thin air) to augment their thrust and climb vertiginously... these are war-games with US Navy jets based in Nanisivik on Baffin Island further east... their 'playground' consists of the entire pie from the Alaska border, up to the North Pole, and down toward Greenland... the previous year, the Navy won the war-games by using automobile radar detectors, which gave their pilots a split-second advantage to detect USAF jets... radar detectors cost $100 each, against jets $10M apiece?

I simply googled here the range in nautical miles of the fighter jets in question. I conservatively mapped a 1250 mile buffer around the two airbases . Iqaluit (frmr. Frobisher Bay) is actually the correct air base, Nanisivik being in far North Ellesmere Island (more here). A mistake in my original post was further compounded by the simple fact that aircraft ranges are an order of magnitude shorter than that originally imagined!

Fact checking urban legends

This map shows how easy it is to fact-check with publicly available data on easy-to-create maps on the web. I further expanded on that in a paper on story maps as a tool toward better news casting here, Map stories can provide dynamic visualizations of the Anthropocene to broaden factually based public understanding [July 2014, The Anthropocene Review 1(3)]:

 

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Cumbria classic revisited, Appleby-in-Westmoreland

 Almost four years ago, a story map here showed the Skelworth Fold area of the Lake District for a friend, using advanced mapping and Environment Agency digital elevation.

"AI for the rest of us", Part VII

Note: the last post on my personal Medium channel shows how I used Copilot AI to good effect for fact-checking. 

Last we showed here how to create "quick & dirty" graphs while chatting on ur mobile. Now we'll see how we can create summaries, not from "text to hand", but from that cribbed off the internet. 

Having left socials, I'm down to corresponding at Extinction Rebellion "Media Tell the Truth" WhatsApp group. Jon Fuller there is also at "Climate Genocide Act Now" here. I was a scientist for Extinction Rebellion, and blogged here about the pandemic against the lies of the British government, as well as about floods and rising sea levels in East Anglia. I didn't know GCAN, however, as I'm no longer active.

"AI for the rest of us", Part VI

Update: Part VII here follows w using ChatGPT to summarize off the web direct.

 Part V (here) showed elaborate (mis)use of AI. Here is a super simple example whipped up in Google Gemini on the phone during a chat about value change over time. Notice all along, adding less & less detail shows AI perists previous prompts.

Northwest Passage Reloaded

Update: right on cue, a photo exhibit on Arctic Life and Climate Change in Budapest HU on Euronews.

Here is an old webpage from 1996 I had to retire a couple years ago. It smacks of urban legend, had I not been told by airport staff in Resolute on Cornwallis Isl., the Arctic Canadian hub (read on):

Hurricanes, tornadoes and sea level rise

Update: see @ bottom example of a Cyclone (Wikipedia) as they're called in the So. Hemisphere.

 Further to our explorations in AI here and to the previous post here, this is a 'conversation' with Copilot, Microsoft Bing's AI extension. Conversation means that you can daisy-chain questions without repeating them, either to extend or to zero in:

Global sea level rise revisited

Update: so follow-on here with definions and relationsips among these topics

I posted here 3 yrs. ago among a series of DIY map notes to encourage Citizen Science, how to use NOAA global digital elevation data to model sea level rise data on straight geometry. See also here for an explanation referring to East Anglia. Here is what it looks like from the DIY document:

"Where in the world is Andrew?", updated

I posted a decade ago here re: creating dynamic maps where my travels can show on video. I have since improved on the original Mercator maps that smear out the poles and make N Hemisphere land mass look a lot bigger than it really is. 

Mercator projection (Wikipedia) started with mariners, whose maps allowed to plot sailings in straight lines. It was later kept by Colonialist Europe and Cold War North America, because it increased the size of colonizers and reduced that of the colonies, or conversely made the Soviet Union look bigger & more threatening.

Global harmonization of climate & temperature data since 1850

Update: a post in SciTech Daily shows that ocean  atmospheric science - shown in this and previous post - is alive and may help with assessing climate change: it's about the doldrums driven by downdrafts not updrafts; at a localized scale, downdrafts  were dramatically reported in passenger flight incidents here or the sinking off Sicily of a superyacht here, and updrafts in increasing mid-Atlantic hurricane generation here. 

CLIWOC tall ships sailings from captains logs

Update: global harmonization of climate data since 1850 follows next.

"CLImatological database of World OCeans" was my first outing using Esri tools as personal project. I found this fabulous dataset with ¼ M points! Detailed here, it came from a 5 yr. EU project to scan captains ships logs for climate data in the 17-19th c. before weather data were recorded. Tall ships were mainly British, Dutch & French, Portuguese notably absent due to Lisbon archive destruction in the 1755 "Great Earthquake" (Wikipedia).