One winter day not long ago, a reporter from the Sacramento Bee called. She had read a story I wrote about life at 40 below in Fairbanks. Meteorologists in the Sacramento office of the National Weather Service office had forecast a drop to 25 degrees in central California; people were concerned about their pipes freezing […]
When a great deal of Earth’s water was locked up within mountains of ice, our ancestors scampered across a dry corridor from what is today Siberia over to Alaska. Those adventurous souls may have been accompanied by another creature that needed wood — the moose. That is the notion of Pam Groves, a scientist […]
A bird the size of your fist has made humans all over the world marvel at the things we can’t do. Like fly. For 11 days straight, from Alaska to Tasmania, your toes not touching earth or water. That’s an average of 765 miles each day, enough to tire a long-haul truck driver burning diesel […]
Standing in the 29-degree air outside a building on the University of Alaska Fairbanks campus, Josephine Galipon held a pinkie-size vial that may have contained tiny organisms locked in a coma for thousands of years. Galipon, a researcher with Keio University in Japan, needed to work outside a heated room so as not to disturb […]