Prudhoe Bay and the North Slope oilfields: taking a look at the 'big oil' community.

• Author: Phelps, Jack E.
• Position: OIL & GAS

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Contemplating Alaska's natural beauty and diverse geography, someone once said: "The only thing Maska lacks is a good desert." In the popular sense of a hot, arid, sandy region, this may be a true statement. But the reality is quite different. While the etymology of the word "desert" leads us back through the Latin to the idea of an uninhabited region, the scientific definition of a desert actually revolves around precipitation. According to the U.S. Geological Survey, arid lands (deserts) by definition receive less than 10 inches of annual precipitation. Alaska's North Slope fits this definition and is therefore an Arctic desert.

Of course, being 250 miles north of the Arctic Circle, this desert is anything but hot. The highest recorded ambient air temperature was 83 degrees, and that was 20 years ago. On the other hand, it can get cold. On Jan. 27, 1989, the Weather Service recorded still air temperature of minus 62 degrees Fahrenheit. The next day, the temperature had risen to minus 54 degrees, but the wind had picked up and was blowing at 31 knots. This, according to the Weather Service, produced a wind chill factor of minus 135 degrees Fahrenheit.

The landscape on most of the North Slope appears barren. But instead of sand dunes and sagebrush, it is covered by moss, lichens and other low-growing tundra plants. And lots of water; there are lakes, ponds, streams and rivers everywhere. North of Atigun Pass, there are no trees at all. State Representative Reggie Joule, who has represented the North Slope in the Alaska Legislature for more than two decades, once jokingly remarked, "I don't like clear cuts. Many years ago, we clear cut our forests on the North Slope and they never grew back."

For centuries, the desert region north of the Brooks Range was home to scattered villages of Inupiat-speaking Eskimos, grizzly and polar bears, Arctic fox and snowshoe hares. The Central Arctic caribou herd, consisting of only about 5,000 animals at the time oil production began, wandered in and out of the Prudhoe Bay area, and the Porcupine caribou herd occasionally spent summers on the coastal plain of what is now the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to the east of Prudhoe Bay. Inupiat whalers plied the Chukchi and Beaufort seas, based out of places like Barrow, Point Lay and Point Hope, working in the region's only industry.

NORTH SLOPE CHANGES

All that began to change in 1968. That year, Arco (newly formed by the merger of...