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 […]