Rick Thoman noted in a recent report that the paucity of 2024-2025 snowfall in Anchorage and other Southcentral Alaska locations may be unprecedented in the era of modern records. “For the three locations with 50-plus years of snowfall data, both Anchorage airport and Alyeska had the lowest mid-winter totals, while the Matanuska Experiment Farm was […]
Pete Wilda, a Fairbanks reader of this column, wanted to know how the snow here can bend off railings and loop from power lines without breaking. He grew up in eastern Wisconsin and doesn’t remember the snow defying gravity there. Snow tilts and bends in Interior Alaska because there’s not much wind and because it’s […]
We can’t see them, but there are more microbes — tiny fungi, bacteria, worms and other living things — in a teaspoon of soil than there are people on Earth. Hungry as you and me, those microbes gobble up bits of plant and animal material. And just like you and me, soil microbes release greenhouse […]
Poking holes in the sea floor that used to be part of the Bering Land Bridge, researchers have found that large swaths of it were floodplains pocked with bogs and ponds that may have restricted passage of animals like the woolly rhino and short-faced bear. Those two species and a few others never seemed to […]