At the end of this month, Vladimir Romanovsky will retire after 30 years as a professor and permafrost scientist at the University of Alaska Fairbanks’ Geophysical Institute. This comes at a time when people — finally — no longer squint at him with a puzzled look when he mentions what he studies. Permafrost is ground […]
A few hours of a December day may affect living things for years to come in the middle of Alaska. On Dec. 26, more than an inch of rain fell over a wide swath of the state. Much of the backcountry of Interior Alaska now has an ice sheet beneath a foot of fluffy snow. […]
While running through Bicentennial Park in Anchorage, biologist Jessy Coltrane spotted a porcupine in a birch tree. On her runs on days following, she saw it again and again, in good weather and bad. Over time, she knew which Alaska creature she wanted to study. “I thought, ‘Oh my god, how does he do it? […]
“We found microplastics in every single rain sample (gathered in Juneau),” Sonia Nagorski told a group of people listening to her talk at the American Geophysical Union Fall Meeting in New Orleans on Dec. 13, 2021. Nagorski — a professor at the University of Alaska Southeast in Juneau — was presenting via her computer while […]