LA PEROUSE GLACIER — During our first lunch at a blue-gravel campsite near this Alaska glacier named after a French explorer, scientist Ben Gaglioti and I had a visitor. As we sat on bleached slabs of wood, I held in my left hand a rectangular cracker with peanut butter smeared on top. We heard a […]
To the delight of the local mosquitoes, Nicholas Hasson steps through a tangle of prickly spruce branches while wearing a backpack that holds a scientific instrument. Hasson is walking as straight a line as he can through a Fairbanks subdivision built in the boreal forest. Hasson studies permafrost at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. He […]
I just so happened to be stretched out on good ol’ Mother Earth the other night when an earthquake happened. On a Memorial Day overnight canoe trip, a friend and I had dragged our boats onto the gravel of a little island on the Chena River. After mosquitoes chased us into our tents and we’d […]
On a fine June day about 100 years ago, in a green mountain valley where the Aleutians stick to the rest of Alaska, the world fell apart. Earthquakes swayed the alders and spruce. A mountain shook, groaned, and collapsed in on itself, its former summit swallowing rock and dust until it became a giant, steaming […]