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Point Barrow or Nuvuk is a headland on the
Arctic coast The Arctic Ocean is the smallest and shallowest of the world's five major oceans. It spans an area of approximately and is known as the coldest of all the oceans. The International Hydrographic Organization (IHO) recognizes it as an ocean, a ...
in the
U.S. state In the United States, a state is a constituent political entity, of which there are 50. Bound together in a political union, each state holds governmental jurisdiction over a separate and defined geographic territory where it shares its sover ...
of
Alaska Alaska ( ; russian: Аляска, Alyaska; ale, Alax̂sxax̂; ; ems, Alas'kaaq; Yup'ik: ''Alaskaq''; tli, Anáaski) is a state located in the Western United States on the northwest extremity of North America. A semi-exclave of the U.S., ...
, northeast of
Utqiaġvik Utqiagvik ( ik, Utqiaġvik; , , formerly known as Barrow ()) is the borough seat and largest city of the North Slope Borough in the U.S. state of Alaska. Located north of the Arctic Circle, it is one of the northernmost cities and towns in the ...
(formerly Barrow). It is the northernmost point of all the territory of the United States, at , south of the
North Pole The North Pole, also known as the Geographic North Pole or Terrestrial North Pole, is the point in the Northern Hemisphere where the Earth's axis of rotation meets its surface. It is called the True North Pole to distinguish from the Mag ...
. (The northernmost point on the North American mainland,
Murchison Promontory Murchison Promontory (), a cape ( promontory) in the northern Canadian Arctic, is the northernmost mainland point of the Americas and of Canada.
in Canada, is farther north.) Point Barrow is an important geographical landmark, marking the limit between two marginal seas of the
Arctic Ocean The Arctic Ocean is the smallest and shallowest of the world's five major oceans. It spans an area of approximately and is known as the coldest of all the oceans. The International Hydrographic Organization (IHO) recognizes it as an ocean, a ...
, the
Chukchi Sea Chukchi Sea ( rus, Чуко́тское мо́ре, r=Chukotskoye more, p=tɕʊˈkotskəjə ˈmorʲɪ), sometimes referred to as the Chuuk Sea, Chukotsk Sea or the Sea of Chukotsk, is a marginal sea of the Arctic Ocean. It is bounded on the west b ...
to the west and the
Beaufort Sea The Beaufort Sea (; french: Mer de Beaufort, Iñupiaq: ''Taġiuq'') is a marginal sea of the Arctic Ocean, located north of the Northwest Territories, the Yukon, and Alaska, and west of Canada's Arctic islands. The sea is named after Sir Fr ...
to the east. It was named by English explorer
Frederick William Beechey Frederick William Beechey (17 February 1796 – 29 November 1856) was an English naval officer, artist, explorer, hydrographer and writer. Life and career He was the son of two painters, Sir William Beechey, RA and his second wife, Anne ...
in 1826 for
Sir John Barrow Sir John Barrow, 1st Baronet, (19 June 1764 – 23 November 1848) was an English geographer, linguist, writer and civil servant best known for term as the Second Secretary to the Admiralty from 1804 until 1845. Early life Barrow was born ...
, a statesman and geographer of the
British Admiralty The Admiralty was a department of the Government of the United Kingdom responsible for the command of the Royal Navy until 1964, historically under its titular head, the Lord High Admiral – one of the Great Officers of State. For much of it ...
. The water around it is normally ice-free for two or three months a year, but this was not the experience of the early explorers. Beechey could not reach it by ship and had to send a ship's boat ahead. In 1826
John Franklin Sir John Franklin (16 April 1786 – 11 June 1847) was a British Royal Navy officer and Arctic explorer. After serving in wars against Napoleonic France and the United States, he led two expeditions into the Canadian Arctic and through ...
tried to reach it from the east and was blocked by ice. In 1837
Thomas Simpson Thomas Simpson FRS (20 August 1710 – 14 May 1761) was a British mathematician and inventor known for the eponymous Simpson's rule to approximate definite integrals. The attribution, as often in mathematics, can be debated: this rule had been ...
walked 50 miles west to Point Barrow after his boats were stopped by ice. In 1849
William Pullen Vice-Admiral William John Samuel Pullen (4 December 1813 – 22 January 1887) was a Royal Navy officer who was the first European to sail along the north coast of Alaska from the Bering Strait to the Mackenzie River in Canada. His 1849 journ ...
rounded it in two whale boats after sending two larger boats back west because of the ice. Point Barrow has been a jumping-off point for many
Arctic expeditions The Arctic ( or ) is a polar region located at the northernmost part of Earth. The Arctic consists of the Arctic Ocean, adjacent seas, and parts of Canada (Yukon, Northwest Territories, Nunavut), Danish Realm (Greenland), Finland, Iceland, N ...
, including the Wilkins-Detroit Arctic Expeditions and the April 15, 1928, Eielson- Wilkins flight across the Arctic Ocean to
Spitsbergen Spitsbergen (; formerly known as West Spitsbergen; Norwegian: ''Vest Spitsbergen'' or ''Vestspitsbergen'' , also sometimes spelled Spitzbergen) is the largest and the only permanently populated island of the Svalbard archipelago in northern Norw ...
. It is 33 km (20.5 mi) northeast of the
Rogers-Post Site The Rogers-Post Site, located on the North Slope of the U.S. state of Alaska, is the location of a plane crash that killed humorist Will Rogers and aviator Wiley Post on August 15, 1935, during an aerial tour of Alaska. It is about southwest o ...
, the scene of the airplane crash on August 15, 1935 that killed
aviator An aircraft pilot or aviator is a person who controls the flight of an aircraft by operating its Aircraft flight control system, directional flight controls. Some other aircrew, aircrew members, such as navigators or flight engineers, are al ...
Wiley Post Wiley Hardeman Post (November 22, 1898 – August 15, 1935) was a famed American aviator during the interwar period and the first pilot to fly solo around the world. Also known for his work in high-altitude flying, Post helped develop on ...
and his passenger, the entertainer
Will Rogers William Penn Adair Rogers (November 4, 1879 – August 15, 1935) was an American vaudeville performer, actor, and humorous social commentator. He was born as a citizen of the Cherokee Nation, in the Indian Territory (now part of Oklahoma ...
. The "Shooting Station" is located a few miles southwest of Point Barrow. It is so named because between 1965 and 1972 it was a launch site for
Nike-Cajun The Nike-Cajun was a two-stage sounding rocket built by combining a Nike base stage with a Cajun upper stage. The Nike-Cajun was known as a CAN for Cajun And Nike. The Cajun was developed from the Deacon rocket. It retained the external size, shap ...
and
Nike Apache The Nike Apache, also known as Argo B-13, was a two-stage sounding rocket developed by Aerolab, later Atlantic Research, for use by the United States Air Force and NASA. It became the standard NASA sounding rocket and was launched over 600 times ...
sounding rocket A sounding rocket or rocketsonde, sometimes called a research rocket or a suborbital rocket, is an instrument-carrying rocket designed to take measurements and perform scientific experiments during its sub-orbital flight. The rockets are used to ...
s. There is a nearby
Global Atmosphere Watch The Global Atmosphere Watch (GAW) is a worldwide system established by the World Meteorological Organizationa United Nations agencyto monitor trends in the Earth's atmosphere. It arose out of concerns for the state of the atmosphere in the 1960s. ...
atmospheric monitoring station. It is immediately adjacent to the Birnirk site. There are still summer cabins constructed by locals and used for subsistence hunting and fishing in this area. The term '' Point Barrow whales'' refers to gray whales that were trapped in the ice at Point Barrow in 1988, which attracted attention from the public worldwide. The Iñupiat do not hunt gray whales and joined in rescue operations which also involved Soviet icebreakers.


Demographics

Point Barrow first appeared on the 1880 U.S. census as the unincorporated Inuit village of "Kokmullit" (AKA Nuwuk). All 200 residents were Inuit. In 1890, it returned as Point Barrow, which also included the Refuge & Whaling Station and native settlements of Nuwuk, Ongovehenok and winter village on "Kugaru" (Inaru) River. It reported 152 residents, of which 143 were Native, 8 were "other race" and 1 was White.http://www2.census.gov/prod2/decennial/documents/1890a_v8-01.pdf It did not report in 1900, but appeared again from 1910-1940. It has not reported separately since.


Archaeological site

Archaeological evidence indicates that Point Barrow was occupied by the ancestors of the
Iñupiat The Iñupiat (or Inupiat, Iñupiaq or Inupiaq;) are a group of Alaska Natives, whose traditional territory roughly spans northeast from Norton Sound on the Bering Sea to the northernmost part of the Canada–United States border. Their current ...
for almost 1,000 years prior to the arrival of the first Europeans. Occupation continued into the 1940s. The headland is an important archaeological site, yielding burials and artifacts associated with the
Thule culture The Thule (, , ) or proto-Inuit were the ancestors of all modern Inuit. They developed in coastal Alaska by the year 1000 and expanded eastward across northern Canada, reaching Greenland by the 13th century. In the process, they replaced people o ...
, including
ulu An ulu ( iu, ᐅᓗ, plural: ''uluit'', 'woman's knife') is an all-purpose knife traditionally used by Inuit, Iñupiat, Yupik peoples, Yupik, and Aleut women. It is utilized in applications as diverse as skinning and cleaning animals, cutting a c ...
it and bola. The waters off Point Barrow are on the
bowhead whale The bowhead whale (''Balaena mysticetus'') is a species of baleen whale belonging to the family Balaenidae and the only living representative of the genus ''Balaena''. They are the only baleen whale endemic to the Arctic and subarctic waters, ...
migration route and it is surmised that the site was chosen to make hunting easier. There are also
burial mounds A tumulus (plural tumuli) is a mound of Soil, earth and Rock (geology), stones raised over a grave or graves. Tumuli are also known as barrows, burial mounds or ''kurgans'', and may be found throughout much of the world. A cairn, which is a ...
in the area, at the nearby Birnirk site, associated with the earlier
Birnirk culture The Birnirk culture was a prehistoric Inuit culture of the north coast of Alaska, dating from the sixth century A.D. to the twelfth century A.D. The Birnirk culture first appeared on the American side of the Bering Strait, descending from the O ...
, a pre-Thule culture first identified in 1912 by
Vilhjalmur Stefansson Vilhjalmur Stefansson (November 3, 1879 – August 26, 1962) was an Arctic explorer and ethnologist. He was born in Manitoba, Canada. Early life Stefansson, born William Stephenson, was born at Arnes, Manitoba, Canada, in 1879. His parents had ...
while excavating in the area. The settlement was called Nuvuk and it was near the "migration path of bowhead whales which would become the cultural and nutritional centre of Nuvuk life."


See also

*
Alaska North Slope The Alaska North Slope ( Iñupiaq: ''Siḷaliñiq'') is the region of the U.S. state of Alaska located on the northern slope of the Brooks Range along the coast of two marginal seas of the Arctic Ocean, the Chukchi Sea being on the western sid ...
*
Utqiaġvik, Alaska Utqiagvik ( ik, Utqiaġvik; , , formerly known as Barrow ()) is the borough seat and largest city of the North Slope Borough, Alaska, North Slope Borough in the U.S. state of Alaska. Located north of the Arctic Circle, it is one of the List of ...
*
Iḷisaġvik College Iḷisaġvik College () is a public tribal land-grant community college in Utqiaġvik (formerly Barrow), Alaska. Operated by the North Slope Borough, a home rule government of the Iñupiat, it is the only tribally controlled college in Alaska, ...
*
North Slope Borough The North Slope Borough is the northernmost borough in the US state of Alaska and thus, the northernmost county or equivalent of the United States as a whole. As of the 2020 census, the population was 11,031. The borough seat and largest city i ...
*
Rogers-Post Site The Rogers-Post Site, located on the North Slope of the U.S. state of Alaska, is the location of a plane crash that killed humorist Will Rogers and aviator Wiley Post on August 15, 1935, during an aerial tour of Alaska. It is about southwest o ...
*
Umiak The umiak, umialak, umiaq, umiac, oomiac, oomiak, ongiuk, or anyak is a type of open skin boat, used by both Yupik and Inuit, and was originally found in all coastal areas from Siberia to Greenland. First arising in Thule times, it has tradition ...


References


External links


Rocket launches at Point Barrow

The papers of Henry W. Greist on Point Barrow
at Dartmouth College Library {{Authority control Barrow, Point Landforms of North Slope Borough, Alaska