1.
Gwich'in
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The Gwich’in are an Athabaskan-speaking First Nations of Canada and an Alaska Native people. They live in the part of North America, mostly above the Arctic Circle. Gwich’in men are known for their crafting of snowshoes, birchbark canoes. The women are renowned for their intricate and ornate beadwork and they also continue to make traditional caribou-skin clothing and porcupine quillwork embroidery, both of which are highly regarded among Gwichin. Today the economy is mostly a mix of hunting, fishing and their name is sometimes spelled Kutchin or Gwitchin and translates as one who dwells or resident of. Historically, the French called the Gwichin Loucheux, as well as the Tukudh, Gwich’in often refer to themselves by the term Dinjii Zhuu instead of Gwich’in. Dinjii Zhuu literally translates as Small People, but figuratively it refers to all Indians, the Gwich’in language, part of the Athabaskan language family, has two main dialects, eastern and western, which are delineated roughly at the United States-Canada border. Each village has unique dialect differences, idioms, and expressions, the Old Crow people in the northern Yukon have approximately the same dialect as those bands living in Venetie and Arctic Village, Alaska. Approximately 300 Alaskan Gwichin speak their language, according to the Alaska Native Language Center, innovative language revitalization projects are underway to document the language and to enhance the writing and translation skills of younger Gwichin speakers. Three major clans survive from antiquity across Gwich’in lands, two are primary clans and the third has a lower/secondary status. The first clan are the Nantsaii, which translates as First on the land. The last clan is called the Tenjeraatsaii, which translates as In the middle or independents and this last clan is reserved for people who marry within their own clan, which is considered incestual. To a lesser degree, it is for children of people who are outside of the clan system, in ancient times this would also refer to the children of Naain, people who were expelled from the tribe due to committing a crime. It also applied to the children of mothers who simply fell outside of the clan system, prior to 1900, being a Tenjeraatsaii automatically placed a Gwich’in at the third-lowest rung of the social ladder. They were to some degree ostracized, the second-lowest rung was reserved for war-captured slaves. The lowest social status was that of a banished Naain or bushman, the clan system is no longer well known or used among the Gwichin. Approximately 9,000 Gwich’in live in 15 small communities in the Northwest Territories and the Yukon Territory of Canada, Gwich’in comedies often contain bawdy humor. Other major characters from the Gwich’in oral tradition include, Googhwaii, Ool Ti, Tłoo Thal, Kaiheenjik, Kiizhazhal, numerous folk tales about prehistoric times all begin with the phrase Deenaadai, which translates roughly as In the ancient days
2.
Old Crow, Yukon
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Old Crow is a dry community in the Canadian Territory of Yukon and is a periglacial environment. It had 245 inhabitants as of 2011, most of them belonging to the Gwichʼin-speaking Aboriginal Vuntut Gwitchin First Nation, the community is situated on the Porcupine River in the far north of the territory. Old Crow is the only Yukon community that cannot be reached by car, an indigenous chief named Deetru Kavihdik, literally Crow-May-I-Walk, helped settle a community here around the 1870s. The town was named after him, the village was founded around muskrat trapping, which continues to provide basic income. The people of Old Crow are dependent on the Porcupine caribou herd for food, the Porcupine caribou herd migrates to the coastal plain in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska to give birth to their young. Many citizens of Old Crow believe the herd is being threatened by oil-drilling in the ANWR and have been heavily involved in lobbying to prevent it. Old Crow Airport provides year-round transportation to other communities, during winter time, a temporary winter road is sometimes built to transport freight into Old Crow, it is not annual, but only when a significant need arises such as a major building project. Old Crow is served by Northwestel since 1971, in the late 1980s, a satellite ground station was installed in Old Crow, providing more reliable service. The long distance connection is noteworthy for two minor incidents, the community operated its own television transmitter to carry CBC television signals from satellite. The current status of this transmitter is unknown since the CBC in 2012 closed down analog transmitters it owned, the community has APTN television, as well as CHON-FM and CKRW transmitters and a community-owned transmitter picking up CBC station CHAK-AM in Inuvik. Old Crow has a subarctic climate. Average annual temperature is −8.3 °C, Old Crow experiences annual temperature average daily highs of 20.2 °C in July and average daily lows of −33.5 °C in January. Record high temperature was 32.8 °C on August 30,1976, Old Crow has little precipitation with an average annual snowfall of 141.4 centimetres and 154.8 millimetres of rainfall. As Old Crow is located north of the Arctic Circle, it experiences polar day or midnight sun in summer, the midnight sun is typically between May 5 and August 8 inclusive, while the polar night usually starts around December 14 and ends by December 29
3.
Yukon
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Yukon is the smallest and westernmost of Canadas three federal territories. The territory has the smallest population of any province or territory in Canada, Whitehorse is the territorial capital and Yukons only city. The territory was split from the Northwest Territories in 1898 and was named the Yukon Territory, though officially bilingual, the Yukon Government also recognizes First Nations languages. At 5,959 m, Yukons Mount Logan, in Kluane National Park and Reserve, is the highest mountain in Canada, most of Yukon has a subarctic climate, characterized by long cold winters and brief warm summers. The Arctic Ocean coast has a tundra climate, notable rivers include the Yukon River, after which the territory was named, as well as the Pelly, Stewart, Peel, White and Tatshenshini rivers. Long before the arrival of Europeans, central and southern Yukon was populated by First Nations people, sites of archeological significance in Yukon hold some of the earliest evidence of the presence of human occupation in North America. The sites safeguard the history of the first people and the earliest First Nations of the Yukon, the volcanic eruption of Mount Churchill in approximately 800 AD in what is now the U. S. Coastal and inland First Nations had extensive trading networks, European incursions into the area only began early in the 19th century with the fur trade, followed by missionaries. By the 1870s and 1880s gold miners began to arrive and this drove a population increase that justified the establishment of a police force, just in time for the start of the Klondike Gold Rush in 1897. The increased population coming with the gold led to the separation of the Yukon district from the Northwest Territories. Its northern coast is on the Beaufort Sea and its ragged eastern boundary mostly follows the divide between the Yukon Basin and the Mackenzie River drainage basin to the east in the Mackenzie mountains. Most of the territory is in the watershed of its namesake, the southern Yukon is dotted with a large number of large, long and narrow glacier-fed alpine lakes, most of which flow into the Yukon River system. The larger lakes include Teslin Lake, Atlin Lake, Tagish Lake, Marsh Lake, Lake Laberge, Kusawa Lake, bennett Lake on the Klondike Gold Rush trail is a lake flowing into Nares Lake, with the greater part of its area within Yukon. Canadas highest point, Mount Logan, is in the territorys southwest, Mount Logan and a large part of the Yukons southwest are in Kluane National Park and Reserve, a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Other national parks include Ivvavik National Park and Vuntut National Park in the north, other watersheds include the Mackenzie River, the Peel Watershed and the Alsek–Tatshenshini, and a number of rivers flowing directly into the Beaufort Sea. The two main Yukon rivers flowing into the Mackenzie in the Northwest Territories are the Liard River in the southeast, notable widespread tree species within Yukon are the black spruce and white spruce. Many trees are stunted because of the growing season and severe climate. The capital, Whitehorse, is also the largest city, with about three-quarters of the population, the second largest is Dawson City, which was the capital until 1952
4.
Geographic coordinate system
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A geographic coordinate system is a coordinate system used in geography that enables every location on Earth to be specified by a set of numbers, letters or symbols. The coordinates are chosen such that one of the numbers represents a vertical position. A common choice of coordinates is latitude, longitude and elevation, to specify a location on a two-dimensional map requires a map projection. The invention of a coordinate system is generally credited to Eratosthenes of Cyrene. Ptolemy credited him with the adoption of longitude and latitude. Ptolemys 2nd-century Geography used the prime meridian but measured latitude from the equator instead. Mathematical cartography resumed in Europe following Maximus Planudes recovery of Ptolemys text a little before 1300, in 1884, the United States hosted the International Meridian Conference, attended by representatives from twenty-five nations. Twenty-two of them agreed to adopt the longitude of the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, the Dominican Republic voted against the motion, while France and Brazil abstained. France adopted Greenwich Mean Time in place of local determinations by the Paris Observatory in 1911, the latitude of a point on Earths surface is the angle between the equatorial plane and the straight line that passes through that point and through the center of the Earth. Lines joining points of the same latitude trace circles on the surface of Earth called parallels, as they are parallel to the equator, the north pole is 90° N, the south pole is 90° S. The 0° parallel of latitude is designated the equator, the plane of all geographic coordinate systems. The equator divides the globe into Northern and Southern Hemispheres, the longitude of a point on Earths surface is the angle east or west of a reference meridian to another meridian that passes through that point. All meridians are halves of great ellipses, which converge at the north and south poles, the prime meridian determines the proper Eastern and Western Hemispheres, although maps often divide these hemispheres further west in order to keep the Old World on a single side. The antipodal meridian of Greenwich is both 180°W and 180°E, the combination of these two components specifies the position of any location on the surface of Earth, without consideration of altitude or depth. The grid formed by lines of latitude and longitude is known as a graticule, the origin/zero point of this system is located in the Gulf of Guinea about 625 km south of Tema, Ghana. To completely specify a location of a feature on, in, or above Earth. Earth is not a sphere, but a shape approximating a biaxial ellipsoid. It is nearly spherical, but has an equatorial bulge making the radius at the equator about 0. 3% larger than the radius measured through the poles, the shorter axis approximately coincides with the axis of rotation
5.
Mammoth
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A mammoth is any species of the extinct genus Mammuthus, proboscideans commonly equipped with long, curved tusks and, in northern species, a covering of long hair. They lived from the Pliocene epoch into the Holocene at about 4,500 years ago in Africa, Europe, Asia and they were members of the family Elephantidae, which also contains the two genera of modern elephants and their ancestors. Mammoths stem from a species called M. africanavus, the African mammoth. These mammoths lived in northern Africa and disappeared about 3 or 4 million years ago, descendants of these mammoths moved north and eventually covered most of Eurasia. These were M. meridionalis, the southern mammoths, the earliest known proboscideans, the clade that contains the elephants, existed about 55 million years ago around the Tethys Sea area. The closest relatives of the Proboscidea are the sirenians and the hyraxes, the family Elephantidae is known to have existed six million years ago in Africa, and includes the living elephants and the mammoths. Among many now extinct clades, the mastodon is only a distant relative of the mammoths, and part of the separate Mammutidae family, which diverged 25 million years before the mammoths evolved. At the same time, the crowns of the teeth became longer, the first known members of the genus Mammuthus are the African species M. subplanifrons from the Pliocene and M. africanavus from the Pleistocene. The former is thought to be the ancestor of later forms, Mammoths entered Europe around 3 million years ago, the earliest known type has been named M. rumanus, which spread across Europe and China. Only its molars are known, which show it had 8–10 enamel ridges, a population evolved 12–14 ridges and split off from and replaced the earlier type, becoming M. meridionalis. In turn, this species was replaced by the mammoth, M. trogontherii, with 18–20 ridges. Mammoths derived from M. trogontherii evolved molars with 26 ridges 200,000 years ago in Siberia, the Columbian mammoth, M. columbi, evolved from a population of M. trogontherii that had entered North America. A2011 genetic study showed that two examined specimens of the Columbian mammoth were grouped within a subclade of woolly mammoths and this suggests that the two populations interbred and produced fertile offspring. It also suggested that a North American form known as M. jeffersonii may be a hybrid between the two species, variations in environment, climate change, and migration surely played roles in the evolutionary process of the mammoths. Take M. primigenius for example, Woolly mammoths lived in opened grassland biomes, the cool steppe-tundra of the Northern Hemisphere was the ideal place for mammoths to thrive because of the resources it supplied. With occasional warmings during the ice age, climate would change the landscape, the word mammoth was first used in Europe during the early 1600s, when referring to maimanto tusks discovered in Siberia. John Bell, who was on the Ob River in 1722 and they were called mammons horn and were often found in washed-out river banks. Some local people claimed to have seen a living mammoth, but they came out at night
6.
Carbon-14
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Carbon-14, 14C, or radiocarbon, is a radioactive isotope of carbon with an atomic nucleus containing 6 protons and 8 neutrons. Its presence in organic materials is the basis of the radiocarbon dating method pioneered by Willard Libby, Carbon-14 was discovered on 27 February 1940, by Martin Kamen and Sam Ruben at the University of California Radiation Laboratory in Berkeley, California. Its existence had been suggested by Franz Kurie in 1934, carbon-12 and carbon-13 are both stable, while the half-life of carbon-14 is 5, 730±40 years. Carbon-14 decays into nitrogen-14 through beta decay, a gram of carbon containing 1 atom of carbon-14 per 1012 atoms will emit 0.40 beta particles per second. The primary natural source of carbon-14 on Earth is cosmic ray action on nitrogen in the atmosphere, however, open-air nuclear testing between 1955–1980 contributed to this pool. The different isotopes of carbon do not differ appreciably in their chemical properties, the emitted beta particles have a maximum energy of 156 keV, while their weighted mean energy is 49 keV. These are relatively low energies, the distance traveled is estimated to be 22 cm in air and 0.27 mm in body tissue. The fraction of the radiation transmitted through the dead layer is estimated to be 0.11. Liquid scintillation counting is the preferred method, the G-M counting efficiency is estimated to be 3%. The half-distance layer in water is 0.05 mm. Radiocarbon dating is a dating method that uses to determine the age of carbonaceous materials up to about 60,000 years old. The technique was developed by Willard Libby and his colleagues in 1949 during his tenure as a professor at the University of Chicago, in 1960, Libby was awarded the Nobel Prize in chemistry for this work. One of the frequent uses of the technique is to date organic remains from archaeological sites, plants fix atmospheric carbon during photosynthesis, so the level of 14C in plants and animals when they die approximately equals the level of 14C in the atmosphere at that time. However, it decreases thereafter from radioactive decay, allowing the date of death or fixation to be estimated. A calculation or a comparison of carbon-14 levels in a sample, with tree ring or cave-deposit carbon-14 levels of a known age. Carbon-14 is produced in the layers of the troposphere and the stratosphere by thermal neutrons absorbed by nitrogen atoms. When cosmic rays enter the atmosphere, they undergo various transformations, the resulting neutrons participate in the following reaction, n +14 7N →14 6C + p The highest rate of carbon-14 production takes place at altitudes of 9 to 15 km and at high geomagnetic latitudes. Production rates vary because of changes to the cosmic ray flux caused by the heliospheric modulation, the latter can create significant variations in 14C production rates, although the changes of the carbon cycle can make these effects difficult to tease out. Another extraordinarily large 14C increase has been associated with the 5480 BC event
7.
Last Glacial Maximum
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The Last Glacial Maximum was the last period in the Earths climate history during the last glacial period when ice sheets were at their greatest extension. Growth of the ice sheets reached their positions in about 24,500 BCE. Vast ice sheets covered much of North America, northern Europe, the ice sheets profoundly affected Earths climate by causing drought, desertification, and a dramatic drop in sea levels. It was followed by the Late Glacial, the formation of an ice sheet or ice cap requires both prolonged cold and precipitation. Hence, despite having temperatures similar to those of glaciated areas in North America and Europe and this difference was because the ice sheets in Europe produced extensive anticyclones above them. These anticyclones generated air masses that were so dry on reaching Siberia and Manchuria that precipitation sufficient for the formation of glaciers could never occur, all over the world, climates at the Last Glacial Maximum were cooler and almost everywhere drier. Even in less affected regions, rainforest cover was greatly diminished, only in Central America and the Chocó region of Colombia did tropical rainforests remain substantially intact – probably due to the extraordinarily heavy rainfall of these regions. Most of the worlds deserts expanded and this also occurred in Afghanistan and Iran, where a major lake formed in the Dasht-e Kavir. In Australia, shifting sand dunes covered half the continent, whilst the Chaco, in northern China – unglaciated despite its cold climate – a mixture of grassland and tundra prevailed, and even here, the northern limit of tree growth was at least 20° farther south than today. During the Last Glacial Maximum, much of the world was cold, dry, and inhospitable, with frequent storms, the dustiness of the atmosphere is a prominent feature in ice cores, dust levels were as much as 20 to 25 times greater than now. This was probably due to a number of factors, reduced vegetation, stronger global winds, the massive sheets of ice locked away water, lowering the sea level, exposing continental shelves, joining land masses together, and creating extensive coastal plains. During the last glacial maximum,21,000 years ago, Northern Europe was largely covered by ice, the southern boundary of the ice sheets passing through Germany and Poland. This ice extended northward to cover Svalbard and Franz Josef Land and northeastward to occupy the Barents Sea, permafrost covered Europe south of the ice sheet down to present-day Szeged in Southern Hungary. Ice covered the whole of Iceland and almost all of the British Isles, britain was no more than a peninsula of Europe, its north capped in ice, and its south a polar desert. There were ice sheets in modern Tibet as well as in Baltistan, in Southeast Asia, many smaller mountain glaciers formed, and permafrost covered Asia as far south as Beijing. Palawan was also part of Sundaland, while the rest of the Philippine Islands formed one large island separated from the continent only by the Sibutu Passage and the Mindoro Strait. In Africa and the Middle East, many mountain glaciers formed. The Persian Gulf averages about 35 metres in depth and the seabed between Abu Dhabi and Qatar is even shallower, being less than 15 metres deep
