EAGLE, ALASKA — While most of the town was sleeping, the ice slipped out. Breakup happened on the Yukon River here at its first settlement in the United States at around 2 a.m. on Saturday, May 7, 2022. That’s when meltwater rushing from side creeks into the colossal groove of the Yukon lifted a winter-hardened […]
Andy Bassich lives on the south bank of the Yukon River, about 12 miles downstream from Eagle, Alaska, the first community in America along the largest waterway in Alaska. Like all of the few thousand people who live along the big river in Alaska, Bassich hopes that river ice formed by the cold air of […]
A study of two powerful earthquakes in adjacent areas of the Alaska Peninsula in 2020 and 2021 shows a connection between the two. It also suggests they may be a part of an 80-year rupture cascade along the fault. The research was published Wednesday in the journal Science Advances in a paper jointly led by University […]
Precipitation more than temperature influenced the distribution of herbivorous dinosaurs in what is now Alaska, according to new research published this month. The finding, published April 2 in the journal Geosciences, discusses the distribution of hadrosaurids and ceratopsids — the megaherbivores of the Late Cretaceous Period, 100.5 million to 66 million years ago. The work […]
A new bulletin published by Alaska Sea Grant summarizes research to inform the public and help them understand the risk of paralytic shellfish toxins in Arctic Alaska food webs and marine mammals. Paralytic shellfish toxins—also called saxitoxins—are produced by microscopic marine algae and can cause paralytic shellfish poisoning (PSP) when people consume shellfish or marine […]
This June, George Divoky will refurbish a cabin that sits on a lonely gravel island north of Alaska. He was not planning a remodel this year. Sometime during the winter, a polar bear tore through a plywood wall of the cabin Divoky moved 20 years ago to Cooper Island. Cooper Island is a crescent of […]
In mid-April, despite a day length that is four hours longer than Miami’s, middle Alaska is still a part of the cryosphere. Scrolling back through my photos, I see snow on the ground during a high-school running competition on Sept. 27. Patches of that snowfall hid from the sun all winter, surviving on north-facing slopes. […]
NORTH OF COLDFOOT — Though the calendar calls it springtime, the thermometer on the truck reads minus 28 F on this sunny morning a few days past spring equinox. I am riding shotgun with Knut Kielland, an ecologist at the Institute of Arctic Biology at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. He has invited me to […]
University of Alaska Fairbanks students will return to several Bristol Bay communities this year to continue quantifying and mapping widespread coastal erosion. Students in the Arctic Coastal Geoscience Lab of the UAF Geophysical Institute have been trudging through mud and scrambling over the debris of slumped-off bluffs in the region since 2016. Their research is […]