In Alaska’s infinite waters swims a handsome, silvery fish. Until recently, we knew little about the Bering cisco, which exists only around Alaska and Siberia. Then a scientist combined his unique life experiences with modern tools to help color in the fish’s life history. Randy Brown is a fisheries biologist with the U.S. Fish and […]
High on the broken pyramid of Iliamna Volcano, rotten rock held in place by volcano-warmed ice sometimes loses its grip. Several times over the years, rock-and-ice avalanches have blasted down Iliamna at 150 miles per hour. Left behind on the mountain’s face is a dirty, five-mile scar, in the same place as the last one. […]
The Alsek, a world-class rafting river that flows into the Gulf of Alaska from its headwaters in Canada, may soon abandon the lower part of its drainage for a steeper one 15 miles away. The Alsek River starts in the Yukon Territory, flows through British Columbia and then on to Dry Bay in Alaska. It […]
While out on a springtime snow trail, I recently saw a dozen white-winged crossbills pecking at snow on the side of the trail. When I reached the spot, I saw a yellow stain from where a team of dogs had paused. Last spring, I saw a bunch of crossbills gathered near an outhouse. They were […]
In mid-March, it is snowing once again in Fairbanks, as it has snowed on many days since October. That makes it a good day to pick up Matthew Sturm’s new book, “Field Guide to Snow.” Sturm is a snow scientist at University of Alaska Fairbanks’ Geophysical Institute who has studied Alaska’s most common ground cover […]
In 1900, Alaska was home to Native people in scattered villages and camps and recently arrived miners who scraped the creeks for gold. Many of the 60,000 souls on the rivers and hills of Alaska stumbled through a big shake that fall, especially those living on Kodiak Island. The largest earthquake on the planet that […]
Glaciologist Martin Truffer changed his team’s plan the other day. He and a crew of other scientists were about to travel to Malaspina Glacier — near the elbow of Alaska where Southeast Alaska hinges onto the mainland — but the glacier has wrecked his campsite. “Mark Fahenstock [another team member] looked at velocities of […]
As a few scientists hiked a path between the ice towers of a Southeast Alaska glacier and crashing ocean waves in 2016, they topped a ridge and saw massive tree trunks poking from gravel ahead. The dead, sheared-off rainforest stems pointed toward the ocean like skeletal fingers. In this “ghost forest,” not visible to fisherman […]
On these quiet, still days, as winter plods on, Alaskans tend to notice any movement outside their windows, such as dancing power wires strung between poles. The answer as to why the wires bounce is in Neil Davis’s “Alaska Science Nuggets.” First, though, a refresher on that book — a compilation of 400 of these […]