This June, George Divoky will refurbish a cabin that sits on a lonely gravel island north of Alaska. He was not planning a remodel this year. Sometime during the winter, a polar bear tore through a plywood wall of the cabin Divoky moved 20 years ago to Cooper Island. Cooper Island is a crescent of […]
In mid-April, despite a day length that is four hours longer than Miami’s, middle Alaska is still a part of the cryosphere. Scrolling back through my photos, I see snow on the ground during a high-school running competition on Sept. 27. Patches of that snowfall hid from the sun all winter, surviving on north-facing slopes. […]
NORTH OF COLDFOOT — Though the calendar calls it springtime, the thermometer on the truck reads minus 28 F on this sunny morning a few days past spring equinox. I am riding shotgun with Knut Kielland, an ecologist at the Institute of Arctic Biology at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. He has invited me to […]
University of Alaska Fairbanks students will return to several Bristol Bay communities this year to continue quantifying and mapping widespread coastal erosion. Students in the Arctic Coastal Geoscience Lab of the UAF Geophysical Institute have been trudging through mud and scrambling over the debris of slumped-off bluffs in the region since 2016. Their research is […]