Eight summers ago, a bolt of lightning struck a dry tundra hillside in northern Alaska. Fanned by a warm wind that curled over the Brooks Range, the Anaktuvuk River fire burned for three months, leaving a scar visible from the International Space Station. The charred area was larger than Cape Cod. While northern Alaska’s treeless […]
Aren Gunderson parks his truck, steps out and strips off his sweatshirt. “I always take off my outer clothing layer,” says the caretaker of the University of Alaska Museum’s colony of flesh-eating beetles. “The stink will stay with you.” Gunderson, mammal collection manager at the museum, approaches a weathered set of buildings. He swings open […]
On a damp island far out in the Aleutian chain, a secret weapon of Japan’s World War II Navy sinks into the sod. A Type-A midget submarine the shape of a killer whale was one of six the Japanese carried to Kiska Island in 1942. Debra Corbett, an archaeologist who spent five weeks on Kiska […]
On a clear day last spring, fire sizzled on water at Poker Flat Research Range in the Chatanika River valley. There, scientists were spilling crude oil in a manmade water basin and torching it from above. A series of similar test burns were part of a team effort between university scientists and researchers with the […]