A few days ago, Mat Wooller had news about a woolly mammoth my friend LJ and I “adopted” last October. “You’ve got one of the youngest ones,” said Wooller, an ecologist at the University of Alaska Fairbanks and inventor of the Adopt-A-Mammoth program. Wooller’s goal is to carbon-date the 1,500 mammoth fossils that rest in drawers […]
While driving Alaska’s graveled highways, people sometimes wonder how an unpaved road can turn into a bed of corduroy. Keith Mather had the same question about roads in his home country of Australia and then later in his adopted home of Alaska. He wrote a paper about washboard roads in 1963, the same year he […]
In mid-June, while standing deep within the northern boreal forest, it’s possible to feel a sensation similar to one felt in mid-December at the same spot. It’s a sting to exposed skin, delivered in December by bitter air and in June by the stab of the mosquito. The mosquito has buzzed its way into most […]
Hazel Sutton was eating lunch on an island at Tanana Lakes Recreation Area in Fairbanks with her family recently when a bird caught her eye. At first, she figured it was a semipalmated sandpiper, an ocean bird that migrates to Interior Alaska each spring to create more sandpipers. Then she squinted and figured that the […]