When I was drinking coffee with a cab-driving-author friend of the same vintage last week, he said of my occupation: “It’s the best job in Alaska.” After a few seconds of pondering, I nodded. It has been 11,000 days since Oct. 25, 1994. That’s when I wrote my first story, a Halloween-themed piece on little […]
In late January 2025, meteorologists from the National Weather Service Prediction Center in College Park, Maryland, are predicting “dangerously cold temperatures and wind chill values for much of the South and eastern U.S.” During this time when peak cold often arrives in the Northern Hemisphere, Alaska today celebrates the king-of-the-cold’s birthday. Jan. 23, 2025, is […]
Right about now, within a shrub in southern Texas, a ruby-crowned kinglet twitches to face northward. In a few months, guided by forces neither the kinglet nor human biologists fully understand, the thumb-size songbird will leap into the air and head for Alaska, where it was born. The bird’s ancestors — and billions like them […]
With his eyes on Alaska weather and climate for many years, Rick Thoman saw a need for a recent update on what is happening within America’s largest state. “Alaska was being hammered with extreme events,” he said. That resulted in the publication of Alaska’s Changing Environment 2.0, a product of the Alaska Center for Climate […]