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 […]
HEADQUARTERS U.S. ARMY ALASKA, FORT WAINWRIGHT, Alaska – U.S. Army Alaska’s 1st Stryker Brigade Combat Team demonstrated its ability to rapidly deploy and operate in extreme cold regions this week with the first-ever deployment of Stryker vehicles north of the Arctic Circle November 3-4. The joint, multi-agency Operation Arctic Pegasus exercised the brigade’s rapid deployment […]
A study of life and extinctions among woolly mammoths and other ice-age animals suggests that interconnected habitats can help Arctic mammal species survive environmental changes. The study appears online Nov. 2 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Short periods of warm climate in the midst of the last ice age triggered boom-and-bust cycles in the populations of large mammals in […]
University of Utah scientists deciphered maternal genetic material from two babies buried together at an Alaskan campsite 11,500 years ago. They found the infants had different mothers and were the northernmost known kin to two lineages of Native Americans found farther south throughout North and South America. By showing that both genetic lineages lived so […]