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 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 […]
Add another species to the list of organisms oozing over Alaska. A tiny gnat — one that in its larval stage sometimes crawls over its brethren’s backs in great numbers until together they resemble a long gray snake — is a newly described species. Alaska insect expert Derek Sikes and postdoctoral researcher Thalles Pereira from […]
Two-hundred and forty-one years ago, when Gen. George Washington marched back into New York City as British troops were walking out, a volcano erupted in Iceland. For eight months of 1783, Laki volcano spewed lava and belched noxious fumes into the atmosphere. One quarter of the residents of Iceland died, and the sulfur-rich gases that […]