A scientist has an idea for reducing global carbon-dioxide emissions — fight Alaska forest fires more aggressively. Carly Phillips, an ecologist with the Union of Concerned Scientists, thinks there is a unique Alaska opportunity to keep carbon in the soil, and in tissues of living trees and other plants. “Alaska stores nearly one half […]
In cold, dry, subarctic air, a rocket taller than a house tilts northward, awaiting the moment when a person inside a nearby concrete building pushes a button. The ink-black Chatanika River valley will then flash white, and erupt with a clap of thunder. A slender NASA vehicle will shoot skyward, carrying a sensitive instrument […]
By the summer of 2020, a landslide will bury a portion of the road from the Denali National Park entrance to Wonder Lake. That’s the conclusion of Zena Robert, a University of Alaska Fairbanks graduate student who visited the park in summer 2019. Last summer, she did a ground survey of giant blobs of […]
For the 20th straight year, in December 2019 I carried a notebook into the halls of the Fall Meeting of the American Geophysical Union. Most of those years the conference was in San Francisco (as it was this year). Back in 1999, when one billion fewer people lived on Earth, the 5,000 scientists who […]