Image: A sedge darner dragonfly rests on a leaf. The dragonfly’s compound eyes are each made up of thousands of light- and motion-sensitive units. Photo-Ned Rozell The Piper Super Cub is a nimble favorite of Alaska bush pilots who land on and take off from gravel bars and mountaintops. Engineers who designed the plane […]
Forty-one volcanoes that have erupted since the 1700s. Eleven percent of the world’s earthquakes. Glaciers of an ever-changing number that probably tops 100,000. Alaska has its share of superlatives, and here’s another one — Alaska has the largest maar on Earth. What’s a maar? It looks a lot like a lake, it’s circular and […]
Marked by metal cones and a clear-cut swath 20 feet wide, Alaska’s border with Canada is one of the great feats of wilderness surveying. The boundary between Alaska and Canada is 1,538 miles long. The line is obvious in some places, such as the Yukon River valley, where crews have cut a straight line […]
During Patrick Druckenmiller’s not-so-restful sabbatical year of 2015, he flew to museums around the world. In Alberta and then London, the University of Alaska Museum of the North’s earth science curator looked at bones of dinosaurs similar to ones found in northern Alaska. The more he squinted at them and chatted with experts, the […]