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A List of Products that Contain Plastic Microbeads By Alex Hamilton You don’t litter, you have a reusable water bottle and you put your groceries in cloth bags. But what’s in your shower? In the past decade, cosmetic companies have increased their output of products with plastic microbeads. Most of these are advertised with the words “scrub” or “exfoliating.” On the ingredients list, “polyethylene” and “polypropylene” are red flags: Both are just types of plastic.  Plastic microbeads in toothpaste. (Creative Commons) Plastic bags and bottles turn into microplastics through a process of degradation, breaking down into smaller and smaller pieces. Microbeads, on the other hand, are already tiny—under 10mm in diameter—by the time they enter watersheds. The beads are small enough that they slip right through water treatment facility filters and into watersheds. Once they make it through, they attract the toxins present in low concentrations in a body of water.
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By Chuck Domenie The trip hatched in June via text. "Call me when you get a chance, I have an idea!" I wrote to Sandra, who was in Glacier View, Alaska, where she spends summers glacier and sea kayak guiding. Almost four years ago to this date, Sandra and I had learned to paddle together on a four-day trip to Casco Bay, Maine, with Green Mountain College. Now, four years later, we are packing our Wilderness System Tempests in Eastport, Maine—the northernmost town on the coast—and getting ready to embark on a month-long journey to paddle the coast, from Canada to New Hampshire.  Sandra Townsend and Chuck Domenie stand on the beach prior to their 250-mile trip along the Maine coast. (Photo courtesy Chuck Domenie) Sandra emailed me a receipt from a purchase of a Maine Island Trail Association membership. Our idea was slowly becoming a reality. We worked out dates, gear and all the other gritty details necessary for spending a month out on the water via phone and email. Finally, on September 17, I drove to Logan Airport in Boston, and we spent the next week and a half gathering gear, planning routes and visiting friends. Nine days later, we launched from Sandra's family cabin on Deep Cove in Eastport at 11 a.m. Along our 250-plus-mile journey, we will be collecting surface water samples for Adventurers and Scientist for Conservation’s Marine Microplastics Project. Chuck Domenie guides standup paddling and kayaking full-time for Eastern Mountain Sports Schools. Keep an eye out for photos from his trip on both ASC and EMS social media. Find more about ASC’s microplastics project on our website, and learn more on our Field Notes blog, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Google+.
Landmark is ASC's groundbreaking project to provide "boots on the ground" support for the American Prairie Reserve management team. Wildlife survey crews consist of skilled outdoors men and women who live and work on Montana's northern Great Plains, collecting data that informs APR's conservation management decisions. 
Driving back to Buffalo Camp, getting the car stuck in the prairie’s infamous gumbo mud. Trying halfhearted to get it out and acquiring a mean number of 50 mosquito bites on part of each calf. Getting towed out by the crew of biologists. Ending the day after sunset with a potluck dinner and new friends.  Sofia Haagberg loves challenges, new experiences and the feeling of doing something important. As a Scandinavian, some of those days on the prairie felt extremely hot to her. Alongside the release of Higher, the new Teton Gravity Research film featuring professional snowboarder Jeremy Jones, TGR and Clif Bar have teamed up to create a short film featuring Jones's work with ASC. Wait, what?! Yeah that's right, we're in a TGR short! "It's not only just going out there for personal enlightenment," Jones says in the film, "but adventuring with a purpose, you can add [another] layer which is doing really positive things for those areas." Check it out: We're looking forward to seeing where this film takes us—and hoping it'll bring in thousands of new snowboarding recruits! Find more about ASC’s Snow and Ice project on our website, and learn more on our Field Notes blog, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Google+.
Landmark is ASC's groundbreaking project to provide "boots on the ground" support for the American Prairie Reserve management team. Wildlife survey crews consist of skilled outdoors men and women who live and work on Montana's northern Great Plains, collecting data that informs APR's conservation management decisions.  Story and Photos By Morgan Cardiff You feel the wind first: a few fresh gusts that relieve some of the day’s heat and force the mosquitoes into hiding. Within the hour you’re scrambling to stop your tent from blowing to the next county. During this particular storm, the first drops began to fall around midnight, a slow but constant tapping on my tent. I woke about four hours later, when, my tent lying half-destroyed around me, I had to look for alternative sleeping arrangements. Over the next 36 hours, the rain continued to fall. Bone-dry creek beds turned into raging torrents, effectively isolating the Landmark crew on what was now our Sun Prairie Island. We had just received eight inches of rain in a 48-hour period. The average rainfall for the town of Malta, 40 miles to the north of the Sun Prairie, is 12 inches.  Following the peak of the storm and a subsidence of the water levels, ASC Program Manager Mike Kautz traverses the swollen Telegraph Creek.  Drilling glacial core samples in Tibet. (Photos by Natalie Kehrwald) Using Radioactive Isotopes to Study High-Elevation Glacial Thinning
By Emily Wolfe Natalie Kehrwald thought she was making a mistake. As a Ph.D. student at Ohio State University in 2008, she had just returned from a 2.5-month expedition collecting ice cores from a glacier at 20,000 feet in Tibet. To date the ice, Kehrwald was looking for the layers of radioactive isotopes present in glaciers worldwide, deposited during Soviet nuclear testing in 1962-1963 and U.S. testing in 1952-1958. “If you find those, you have an exact date and an idea of how much snow and ice has accumulated over top of that,” she says. But Kehrwald couldn’t find the isotopes. So she analyzed a parallel core, still not finding either radioactive peak. With a colleague, she performed additional tests with the same results. Finally they looked at the uppermost ice and found it dated from the 1940s, which means any accumulation from that time on had melted. This was the first time anyone had proven that glaciers thin from the top down at such high elevations in the Himalaya, and it had massive implications. |
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