Arctic Wolf Attacks Scientist -- A Unique Canadian Incident

Recent biological studies have concluded that North American wolves are rarely dangerous to humans. To date the scientific literature contains only one well-documented account of a vicious wolf attack on a man, an incident that took place in northwestern Ontario in 1942. A much earlier attack, however, took place in February 1915 on the Coppermine River in Canada's Arctic. Though mentioned in two publications in the 1920s, this incident has escaped the scientists' notice and is reported again now with additional information. In this encounter a large white wolf (Canis lupus mackenzii Anderson) entered the campsite of members of the 1913-18 Canadian Arctic Expedition and on discovery attacked one of the scientists. The incident is unique for three reasons: (1) the existence and reliability of eyewitness accounts of the attack in the unpublished diaries of two of the scientific members, one of whom was the wolf's victim; (2) the chance coincidence that the man who shot the wolf was a mammalogist responsible for collecting arctic specimens for the National Museum of Canada in Ottawa; and (3) the existence today, 70 years later, of the wolf mount in the museum's research collection.Key words: Arctic, wolf, Rudolph Anderson, Diamond Jenness, Frits Johansen, Canadian Arctic ExpeditionMots clés: Arctique, loup, Rudolph Anderson, Diamond Jenness, Frits Johansen, expédition arctique canadienn

LSST: from Science Drivers to Reference Design and Anticipated Data Products

(Abridged) We describe here the most ambitious survey currently planned in the optical, the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST). A vast array of science will be enabled by a single wide-deep-fast sky survey, and LSST will have unique survey capability in the faint time domain. The LSST design is driven by four main science themes: probing dark energy and dark matter, taking an inventory of the Solar System, exploring the transient optical sky, and mapping the Milky Way. LSST will be a wide-field ground-based system sited at Cerro Pach\'{o}n in northern Chile. The telescope will have an 8.4 m (6.5 m effective) primary mirror, a 9.6 deg$^2$ field of view, and a 3.2 Gigapixel camera. The standard observing sequence will consist of pairs of 15-second exposures in a given field, with two such visits in each pointing in a given night. With these repeats, the LSST system is capable of imaging about 10,000 square degrees of sky in a single filter in three nights. The typical 5$\sigma$ point-source depth in a single visit in $r$ will be $\sim 24.5$ (AB). The project is in the construction phase and will begin regular survey operations by 2022. The survey area will be contained within 30,000 deg$^2$ with $\delta<+34.5^\circ$, and will be imaged multiple times in six bands, $ugrizy$, covering the wavelength range 320--1050 nm. About 90\% of the observing time will be devoted to a deep-wide-fast survey mode which will uniformly observe a 18,000 deg$^2$ region about 800 times (summed over all six bands) during the anticipated 10 years of operations, and yield a coadded map to $r\sim27.5$. The remaining 10\% of the observing time will be allocated to projects such as a Very Deep and Fast time domain survey. The goal is to make LSST data products, including a relational database of about 32 trillion observations of 40 billion objects, available to the public and scientists around the world.Comment: 57 pages, 32 color figures, version with high-resolution figures available from https://www.lsst.org/overvie

Letter to H.B. Stenzel from Stuart E. Jenness on 1956-01-27

Jackson School of Geoscience