During these late winter days, researchers who are studying the rusty discoloration of northern Alaska streams are prepping for summer field trips. Jon O’Donnell of the National Park Service is one of a team of scientists who will float rivers and streams in Kobuk Valley National Park and Noatak National Preserve in 2024. He and […]
For years, scientists have wondered why North America’s highest mountain is not a volcano. All the ingredients for volcanic activity lurk deep beneath Denali, which sits above where one planetary plate grinds past another. Recently, while looking for something else, researchers found a reservoir of what might be magma, 7 miles beneath the muskeg of […]
The Russian invasion of Ukraine is biasing predictions of how the Arctic will respond to climate change, according to a team of international scientists, including one from the University of Alaska Fairbanks. Their study, published Monday, January 22 in Nature Climate Change, compared the ability of Earth systems models to estimate the effects of climate change […]
The female woolly mammoth was 20 years old when she stumbled amid the grasslands. She fell in a cloud of dust, then gasped her last breath of cool air. It was a late-summer day, 14,000 years ago. Over her lifetime, this creature had wandered from Canada’s Yukon territory into Alaska, where she died at […]