(Photo by Joel Berger)
Some muskoxen weigh over a thousand pounds. They're hard animals to miss--that is, if you've hopped in a snow machine and traveled across an Arctic tundra for a few hours in search of a herd. But to understand muskoxen there's no alternative but to be where they live. You can't Google-Earth your way to insight.
This week in the New York Times, I wrote about Joel Berger, a biologist who has spent a lot of time looking at muskoxen over the past decade. Berger's research has revealed a worrying vulnerability in these polar giants. Climate change may starve pregnant muskoxen mothers. You can read the whole story here.
Of course, Western scientists are not the only people who have spend time observing muskoxen and other animals of the Arctic. Berger has also been integrating the knowledge and language of the Inupiat people who live in Alaska into his own understanding of muskoxen and their environment. In the thousands of years they've lived in the Arctic, the Inupiat and other indigenous peoples have seen a lot--including huge ice tsunamis that might also pose a threat to animals like muskoxen. Maddie Stone at Earther and Robinson Meyer at the Atlantic both report on that aspect of the work.
February 15, 2018, Rochester, NY: Neilly Series Lecture. "A Voyage to the Center of the Brain."
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