My backyard adjoins the thousand-acre wood that makes up the north campus of the University of Alaska Fairbanks. Several times over the last few decades that I’ve been employed as a science writer, I have written stories set within this large chunk of mostly undisturbed boreal forest. Today, a researcher visited me here in response […]
Two University of Alaska Fairbanks students are making their way up Denali while sampling for microplastics within the snow covering the 20,310-foot mountain. One of them, Matthew Crisafi-Lurtsema, has been sending back satellite texts, one each day since they flew from Talkeetna to Denali’s Kahiltna Glacier on May 8, 2024. As of May 17, 2024, […]
Kevin White has placed his hands on the long, white fur of more than 400 Alaska mountain goats during the past 20 years. His diligence in studying this Ice Age wanderer of high, steep country has led to a new understanding — a surprising number of the creatures die by snow avalanche. White works out […]
Two college students will soon be stuffing snow from the slopes of Alaska’s highest mountain into Nalgene bottles. Their goal is to see if that frozen precipitation contains tiny plastic particles that are ubiquitous everywhere else on Earth. Matthew Crisafi-Lurtsema, 20, and Roger Jaramillo, 23, are both undergraduate engineering students at the University of Alaska […]