Will Harrison, who knew the world’s bumpy plains of ice as well as his old neighborhood in Saint John, New Brunswick, has died. He was 84. From his arrival at the Geophysical Institute at the University of Alaska Fairbanks in January 1972, the Canada-born Harrison mapped out and executed studies of glaciers from Antarctica […]
Within their bulbous bodies, Steller sea lions of the western Aleutian Islands seem to carry more mercury than sea lions closer to mainland Alaska. By looking at tiny bits of fish and squid, a graduate student is trying to find out where that mercury is coming from. Steller sea lions drape their chocolate bodies […]
Katie Kangas operates a bed-and-breakfast in Ruby, Alaska. On the morning of October 15, she turned to look out her picture window, toward the cabin next door. She was waiting for her client to switch the light on, at which point she would step out and deliver his breakfast. Staring out into the darkness, […]
Biologist Stacia Backensto has fooled a raven. When trying to recapture birds on Alaska’s North Slope during her graduate student days at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, she wore a moustache and beard. She also strapped pillows to her waist. “By the time I got around to the beard and the duct-taping of the […]
This message once came from the grandfather of 5-year-old Ben, who lived near Inverness, Scotland: “Even in winter he will rapidly strip off and often plays in a sleeveless vest while others still have a shirt and woolly jumper on. He appears to be always warm.” Ben, it seemed, had a remarkable tolerance for […]
A few nights ago, stretched in a tent on the blue-gray gravel of the Lowe River floodplain, I woke to a series of sharp jolts. It felt like the earth was a giant halibut, and I was the fishing pole. Earthquake! The ratcheting westward lasted only a few seconds, but I felt the helplessness […]
Ben Jones recently returned to the tundra site of a plane crash that in May took the life of the pilot, and left Jones bloodied and broken. Jones is a do-it-all scientist with the Institute of Northern Engineering at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. He is inventive and opportunistic, pursuing curiosities of northern Alaska […]
While wandering middle Alaska this summer, I noticed orange spruce trees along the entire length of the Denali Highway, from Paxson to Cantwell. In what looked like a dendrological case of frostbite, tips of every branch were afflicted with something. The real show happened when the wind blew: An entire valley glowed apricot. After […]
Early in his career, on a wet, windy, foggy night, Guy Tytgat checked into the loneliest hotel in the Aleutians. His room was four feet wide and five feet tall, made of fiberglass, and perched on the lip of a volcanic crater. Tytgat did not enjoy the evening he shared with 420 pounds of […]