In the latest log, Skipper Wilson talked a bit about his mom, who turned 93 yesterday.

Back in 1938, when Mrs. Wilson was a young woman, she moved to what was then known as the Alaskan Territory. (It didn’t become a state until 1959.) She lived in Fairbanks, located in central Alaska, which is now the state’s second largest city with just under 35,000 residents. She moved there to take a job at a new radio station, KFAR, where she had a radio show called “Tundra Topics.”

Today, Alaska is the biggest state in the country — larger than Washington, D.C., and the 22 smallest states combined. Because of its large size and its northern location, it has a lot of interesting geography. Alaska is home to Mount McKinley (also called Denali), the tallest mountain in North American; the Bering Glacier, which is similar to the Antarctic glaciers we talked about in the last post and earlier this year; and the volcano Mount Shishaldin, which is noted for its shape — a nearly perfect cone.

Alaska is also the only area of Arctic tundra in the United States. Tundra describes a region that has few trees, permafrost (perpetually frozen soil), and dry, windy weather. But just like in Antarctica, the tundra is threatened by global warming as higher temperatures melt the permafrost. Unfortunately, as the tundra’s permafrost warms, it releases carbon into the atmosphere, which makes the air even warmer. This cycle makes this an area of concern for scientists worried about global warming and climate change.

Don’t forget to tune into Skipper Wilson’s latest podcast. Oh, and Happy Birthday, Mrs. Wilson.

Late last month, Skipper Wilson had a conversation on the satellite phone with a teacher studying Adélie penguins in Cape Royds, Antarctica. Ms. Jean Pennycook is a high school teacher from Fresno, California, and every year for the last three years she has been spending time with researcher Dr. David Ainley studying and documenting the Adélie penguins and the way their habitat is changing due to global warming.

Adélie penguins are a smaller breed of penguins. They grow to be 1.5-2.5 feet tall and weigh about 10 pounds. During the colder months in the Southern Hemisphere, the Adélies, who cannot fly, live on ice floating in the sea and fish in the ocean. But each December, when the weather warms, they return to the coast of Antarctica and its surrounding islands. They flock to the areas where the beaches slope gently up from the sea and where they can build nests out of rocks and lay their eggs. (In case you’re wondering about some of the cartoon penguins you’ve seen in movies, Adélie penguins are more like the ones in Madagascar than the main characters in Happy Feet.)

Unfortunately, scientists have found that the world is warming. It’s not something that most people notice on a day-to-day basis, but by measuring and comparing data over time, researchers have found that the slight increase in temperature is causing the ice in Antarctica to melt. This means that the places where the Adélies live is disappearing. As there are fewer places to live and hunt for food and as ice floes where the birds summer drift too far from where they can breed, the penguins begin to die off. Today only 5 million Adélie penguins still live in the Antarctic region, but their colonies have shifted from the northern areas of the continent, which have grown too warm, to the cooler southern areas.

SitesALIVE! has put together a great video to go with the phone conversation between Skipper Wilson and Ms. Pennycook. Check it out! And while you’re there, take a look at some of the resources Ms. Pennycook thinks you’d find helpful in learning more about Adélie penguins. As always, make sure you stop by to read Skipper Wilson’s latest log to see how his trip north is going.

It has been 100 days since Skipper Wilson left Les Sables d’Olonne, France, to sail around the world in the Vendée Globe. Yesterday, right around noon, he crossed the Equator to return to the Northern Hemisphere. He’s now working his way back through the Doldrums.

Since November 9, Skipper Wilson has sailed approximately 21,000 nautical miles. He has a little less than 3,000 more to go. You can read his latest log here or listen to his most recent podcast here.

Thirty sailors set sail from France 100 days ago. As of today, six have completed the race and five more are headed north hoping to finish in the next few weeks.

Good luck, Skipper Wilson! We know you can do it!

Skipper Wilson is sailing past Brazil this week. In addition to being the largest country in South America, Brazil also is the fifth largest in the world — and home to the majority of the Amazon Rainforest.

The Amazon Rainforest is a tropical rainforest, meaning that it’s located near the equator (so it’s warm), it gets a lot of rain, and many different types of trees grow there — both deciduous (trees that lose their leaves every year) and non-deciduous (trees that hold onto their leaves year round). Their branches grow so close together that they create a canopy (or overhang) that protects everything else growing below.

The Amazon Rainforest gets 69-79 inches of rain a year, making it a fertile place for plants to grow. And where plants grow, usually you find animals that eat them (and other animals that eat the plant-eaters). So it’s not really surprising that the rainforest is home to lots of living things. Scientists aren’t sure exactly how many, because they find new plants and animals there regularly. So far, though, they’ve found tens of thousands of plants, 2.5 million types of insects, and several thousand mammals, birds, reptiles, and amphibians.

That’s a lot of interesting plants and animals. Scientists have found plants there that they think may help to fight cancer and some they already know help against malaria, which is a deadly disease spread by mosquito bites in many humid areas of the world. They also have found unique animals, like blue poison dart frogs (seen in the photo above), electric eels, and vampire bats.

The Amazon region is a huge area that covers 1.4 billion acres of land. That’s double the amount of land in Alaska, Texas, and California combined. But every year there is less and less of it because people are cutting down the trees for a variety of reasons, including highway building and farming. If people keep cutting down the trees, scientists estimate that within twenty years nearly half the Amazon Rainforest will be gone. In addition to the trees that would be lost, animals and other plants would die off and native tribes would have to leave their homelands. All of this would cause huge climate change problems. Scientists are hard at work preventing the loss of the forests in this area, but it’s hard to protect an area that is governed by nine different countries. At the very least, it seems like everyone might have to do with a little less in order to keep such an important resource intact.

Read Skipper Wilson’s thoughts on preserving our natural resources here, and keep up to date with his journey in his most recent log and podcast.

On Sunday afternoon, French Skipper Michel Desjoyeaux, sailing the Foncia completed the 2008–2009 Vendée Globe Race in the impressive time of 84 days, 3 hours, and 9 minutes (beating the previous record by more than three days).

Skipper Desjoyeaux, who also won the race eight years ago, had this to say about his historic finish:

I won this Vendée Globe before the start with the choices I made, with the team and the experience I have built up. Eighty percent of the end result is before the start of the race. But it is a whole lot of things, and the other twenty percent are during the race itself, in believing, having faith, in doing it, maneuvering…

Skipper Wilson, who currently is off the coast of Uruguay, also has been thinking about decisions. In his essay last week, he wrote about how he, too, made many choices about the race long before the starting pistol fired. But these days it’s the decisions at sea, when Skipper Wilson is weary, that are the tough ones.

Skipper Wilson’s friend and fellow sailor, Rich du Moulin, had this to say about making those choices:

Decision-making at sea is very hard because you are tired, alone, and sometimes scared. Very often you do not have much time to act. Making a good decision relies on experience and judgment for sure, but planning and preparation are also very important. If you can anticipate a problem, then you can plan ahead and not have to make a last-second decision which might be too late.

So Skipper Wilson relies on his years of experience sailing and depends on his team back on land to help him make the decisions that his experiences don’t help him with.

That’s not so different from the rest of us. We all have previous experiences that help us make smart choices and people around us to ask for advice when we aren’t sure what to do. We make choices every day: what to wear, whom to sit with on the bus, whether to look before crossing the street, how to study for a test. Each decision has tradeoffs and can have a long-lasting impact on our lives or people around us.

Have you ever had to make a hard choice? What did you do? Now that you’ve seen how things turned out, would you make the same decision? What do you think would have happened if you’d made a different choice? And do you think you could have guessed about what might happen before you made your choice?

Skipper Wilson and his competitors have to make lots of choices, too: when to eat, whether to come to the rescue of another sailor, what route to take, when to switch sails, whether to fix equipment that isn’t working. Each of these small decisions can keep them in the race or cause them to drop out. Thirty racers started the race and only eleven remain in it today. Skipper Desjoyeaux decided to return to port shortly after the race start to make repairs before setting out again — and his decision paid off. Skipper Wilson made the decision to make the voyage in an older, but sturdy, boat that had already sailed around the world successfully. The Great American III is slower because of its age, but so far is steady under Skipper Wilson’s hand.

So far his decision seems to have been a good one.