Greta Mart

For years, Debbie Corbett was regional archeologist for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. She retired in 2013 and began freelancing. She also started working on organizing a forum for scientists doing research in any field - as long as it was centered on the Aleutian Islands.

Corbett says the idea hatched at a National Science Foundation-funded workshop on North Pacific archeology a few years back.

Daily since late April, researchers have made their way to the end of A dock at Unalaska's Carl E. Moses boat harbor. There they pull up a series of people-sized circular nets - sort of like Japanese paper hanging lanterns - and peer inside.

Jeff Cox is a contractor for the Bering Sea Fisheries Research Foundation. Vanessa White is with NOAA's Alaska Fisheries Science Center. Both are based in Seattle and are working together on this leg of the study.

It was 1970 when marine ecologist Dr. James Estes first came to Alaska to study marine life. 

Estes flew out to the Aleutian Islands at the behest of the Atomic Energy Commission. He was hired to asses what may happen to local wildlife when the government blew up a nuclear bomb buried roughly one mile deep on a small island almost to Russia.