[HN Gopher] The Detective of Northern Oddities (2017)
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       The Detective of Northern Oddities (2017)
        
       Author : MississippiGary
       Score  : 17 points
       Date   : 2023-01-07 02:53 UTC (20 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.outsideonline.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.outsideonline.com)
        
       | andrewl wrote:
       | When I saw the title I thought at first it was about police and
       | legal work in Canada or Alaska. It's actually about warming and
       | the spread of disease in the Arctic, and I thought it was
       | fascinating. Here are a few excerpts in case anybody is on the
       | fence about reading it:
       | 
       | When a creature mysteriously turns up dead in Alaska-be it a sea
       | otter, polar bear, or humpback whale-veterinary pathologist Kathy
       | Burek gets the call. Her necropsies reveal cause of death and
       | causes for concern as climate change frees up new pathogens and
       | other dangers in a vast, thawing north.
       | 
       | Burek often spends her days cutting up the wildest, largest,
       | smallest, most charismatic, and most ferocious creatures in
       | Alaska, looking for what killed them. She's been on the job for
       | more than 20 years, self-employed and working with just about
       | every organization that oversees wildlife in Alaska. Until
       | recently, she was the only board-certified anatomic pathologist
       | in a state that's more than twice the size of Texas. (There's now
       | one other, at the University of Alaska.) She's still the only one
       | who regularly heads into the field with her flensing knives and
       | vials, harvesting samples that she'll later squint at under a
       | microscope.
       | 
       | A lot of research worldwide has focused on how climate change
       | will increase disease transmission in tropical and even temperate
       | climates, as with dengue fever in the American South. Far less
       | attention has been paid to what will happen-indeed, is already
       | happening-in the world's highest latitudes, and to the people who
       | live there. Put another way: The north isn't just warming. It has
       | a fever.
       | 
       | This matters to you and me even if we live thousands of miles
       | away, because what happens in the north won't stay there. Birds
       | migrate. Disease spreads. The changes in Alaska are harbingers
       | for what humans and animals may see elsewhere. It's the front
       | line in climate change's transformation of the planet.
       | 
       | Addressing a visitor to a necropsy who found the experience
       | challenging: "The only shame is if you pass out where we can't
       | find you."
        
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       (page generated 2023-01-07 23:02 UTC)