The number of golden eagles that spend summers in Alaska is more than three times the previous estimate, biologists just determined. At least 12,700 of the 12-pound predatory birds migrate to Alaska each summer in order to create new golden eagles. That number is about one-quarter of all the golden eagles in North America. Several […]
A NASA sounding rocket soared high from a launchpad in Norway on Wednesday morning in a decades-old quest to understand the cause of a persistent dense patch of upper atmosphere on Earth’s sun-facing side. The Cusp Region Experiment-2, or C-REX-2, is headed by space physicist Mark Conde of the University of Alaska Fairbanks Geophysical Institute […]
A random meeting between a scientist and an artist in the remote and quirky village of McCarthy, Alaska, last year led to new ways to communicate with the public about rapid changes occurring on the Kennicott Glacier. Glaciologist Eric Petersen from the University of Alaska Geophysical Institute met artist and arts administrator Nina Elder during […]
In the deep blue ocean just off the coast of Alaska, killer whales are now communicating with one another with clicks and whistles. Scientists are hearing them. Hannah Myers has listened to many hours of orca calls in the Gulf of Alaska. The University of Alaska Fairbanks graduate student often knows a killer whale’s family […]
A bar-tailed godwit recently arrived in New Zealand on its second attempt to get there from Alaska, after a storm had blasted it back north. Keith Woodley of the Pukorokoro Miranda Shorebird Centre on the North Island of New Zealand reported that a male godwit carrying a satellite transmitter first left the mudflats near the […]
The research vessel Sikuliaq navigated among and around the chunks and slabs of Arctic sea ice above Alaska for several weeks on two voyages this fall, breaking through frozen slabs when it had to just as its sturdy hull is designed to do. Satellite imagery produced at the Geographic Information Network of Alaska, or GINA, at the University […]
Pencil-beaked shorebirds with the ability to stay airborne for a week — flying all the way from Alaska to New Zealand — rely on a few crescents of mudflat to fuel that incredible journey. Scientists recently found that almost the entire population of bar-tailed godwits that breed in Alaska fatten up on clams and worms […]
In a cavernous room within the university’s new engineering building, a bus squats on four flat tires. In this place, the 1946 International Harvester model K-5 looks small, for maybe the first time in its eventful existence. Not long after World War II, those black tires crunched the gravel of the new Alaska Highway during […]
Charles Deehr will never forget his first red aurora. On Feb. 11, 1958, Deehr was a student at Reed College in Portland, Ore. He asked a Fulbright student from Norway named Tone to the Portland Symphony that night. They went for a stroll on a golf course after the concert. Looking past the treetops, they […]