In a packed university conference room, biologist Randy Brown spoke of chinook, the fatty king of far-north salmon. “It’s more than just a fish, it’s a culture,” Brown said to the Fairbanks crowd, many of them Alaska Natives. Brown is the lead author on a paper in which he documented all the known Yukon River […]
What’s this? Another aftershock? That’s hundreds now, each fainter than the last. Sorry, I guess I’ve moved on. I should pay more attention, given that you — a 7.9 deep in the seafloor not far from Kodiak — are the most powerful earthquake on the planet since the one off Mexico last August. It’s just that […]
Two things happened on top of the world this week. In Utqiagvik (formerly Barrow), on Jan. 22 the sun topped the horizon for the first time since mid-November. The day before that, Jan. 21, was the first time since Halloween the town’s thermometers recorded a below-normal daily average air temperature. The returning daylight for the […]
WASHINGTON— The U.S. Supreme Court today declined a challenge to federal protection of bearded seals in Alaska under the Endangered Species Act. The National Marine Fisheries Service listed the species as threatened in 2012 upon concluding that climate change will destroy the sea-ice habitat the seals need to survive. The decision comes just two weeks […]