To put the largest eruption in Alaska’s written history in context, Robert Griggs pondered what might have happened if the volcano that erupted in summer of 1912 was located on Manhattan Island rather than the Alaska Peninsula. “In such a catastrophe all of Greater New York would be buried under ten to fifteen feet of […]
American robins have returned to northern Alaska. A male is now perched above me in a balsam poplar tree on this bench of well-drained land upon which sits the University of Alaska Fairbanks campus. The robin sings his complex, familiar song just hours after his return from somewhere farther south. The sound waves from that […]
A Fairbanks biologist recently cupped in his hand a tiny bird whose arrival he had been rooting for. That bird — a female Hammond’s flycatcher — now holds the title of the oldest known of its species. A few days ago, Robert Snowden of the Alaska Songbird Institute in Fairbanks felt his heart beat a […]
Civil War veteran Charles Raymond was 27 when he accepted an assignment to visit the new U.S. territory of Alaska, a place so far away from his home in New York City he couldn’t imagine it. Two years after Secretary of State William Seward had brokered the purchase of Alaska from Russia, U.S. leaders suspected […]