The ‘Ice Tsunami’ That Buried a Whole Herd of Weird Arctic Mammals
The biologist Marci Johnson spent the daylight hours of Valentine’s Day 2011 in a helicopter, high over the Alaskan coastline, searching for musk oxen.
It was part of her job. Through the winter, she regularly went to check in on animals that she and her fellow researchers had outfitted with radio collars the year before. On this particular flight, she quickly found what she was looking for: a pack of 55 musk oxen moseying along in the snow. From the helicopter, Johnston could detect all four radio collars chirping happily—the “alive” signal.
She returned home to Kotzebue, Alaska, where she lived and worked as a biologist with the U.S. National Park Service. Winter wore on. A blizzard roared in off the Arctic Ocean, bringing whiteout conditions and winds between 60 and 100 miles per hour. What had been most unusual, though, was the storm surge—she remembers meteorologists warning local residents not to tie up their dogs close to the beach.
A few weeks later, she flew out again to check in.
