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 […]
Konrad Steffen, 68, died Aug. 8, 2020, when he fell into a meltwater-filled crevasse on the Greenland ice sheet. The glaciologist never worked in Alaska, but Steffen’s work influenced a scientist here, his countryman Martin Truffer. Truffer was born in Switzerland, as was Steffen. Truffer, a professor who studies glaciers at the Geophysical Institute […]
People in an 80-foot charter boat out of Petersburg recently saw what a biologist described as a “less-than-once-in-a-lifetime” event: a white killer whale swimming through the sea. UAF graduate student Stephanie Hayes was on the Northern Song, operated by Captain Dennis Rogers, on August 7, 2020, just offshore of the village of Kake. Hayes, […]
Right now, on the brushy tundra of northern Alaska, grizzly bears are gathering at quiet streams and rivers, attracted by the largest calorie reward they can find — spawning salmon. Until recently, scientists did not know salmon swam up some of these waterways, nor that grizzlies were fattening up on them before entering hibernation. […]
In this era of limited air travel, my family and I have spent most of our recent months in Fairbanks. Here, we are surrounded by spruce and birch trees of the boreal forest, a swath of mosquito-laden vegetation that stretches from Alaska all the way to Nova Scotia. We just punched out of that […]
Late in the evening of July 21, 2020, State Seismologist Michael West heard a text alarm. His phone informed him of a large earthquake beneath the ocean, just south of the Alaska Peninsula, about 60 miles southeast of the village of Sand Point. His first thought was that this — the biggest earthquake on […]
As I started hiking a ridgetop during the July 4th weekend, a friend told me to look for the mushroom rock ahead. At first, I thought I may have heard her wrong. But a few hours later I saw the rock she was talking about. It appeared to be a granite tor, but looked […]