EPOW - Ecology Picture of the Week

The Dalton and the Pipeline

Dalton Highway and Trans-Alaska Pipeline
Alaska, USA

Explanation:  Welcome to the Haul Road, as it is colloquially called.  We are in arctic Alaska, on the Dalton Highway, a.k.a. North Slope Haul Road (and officially known as the James W. Dalton Highway), heading north past Anaktuvuk Pass, through the northern foothills of the Brooks Range.  You can see by the above photo why it's called the Haul Road, serving as a major corridor for trucks hauling goods and resources north and south.

But also there runs the 800-mile (1,287-km) long Trans-Alaska Pipeline, first installed in the mid-1970s, to transport oil from Prudhoe Bay and offshore drilling stations southward to the Gulf of Alaska for further ship transport south.

The highway follows the course of the pipeline (or vice versa) through remote arctic lands of white spruce and tundra.  Along several adventures on (and flying above) the highway, I saw how both highway and pipeline carve along the topography of these boreal and arctic lands.

Notice how the pipline zigs and zags as the oil runs downhill by gravity-feed.  The bends and turns of the pipe are to moderate and slow the velocity of the oil so it does not rupture the pipe sections by force of its mass and momentum.

And here, notice how the pipeline dives underground, apparently to maintain a specific angle to keep the oil flowing at specific velocities and volumes.  

But here, the pipeline dives underground for only a few feet!  Why?  And what are all those poles?
Apparently, this serves as a cooling station, to reduce the temperature of the oil in the pipe, that otherwise unduly heats up from friction and velocity.  The pipes are there to radiate the warmth away from the pipe and into the atmosphere.

A bit further south, the pipeline joins the highway over the Yukon River, connecting to the 2,295 foot (700 meter) Yukon River Bridge, formally known as the E. L. Patton Bridge, near Koyukuk in east central Alaska: 

And on it goes, highway racing the pipeline (or vice versa?), across the spruce landscapes and barren tundra, across the mountains, feeding our energy-hungry society with the blood of the Earth.   

But now, there may be grave threat to the pipeline from regional climate warming and thawing of the permafrost!