On a recent river trip in northern Alaska, scientists from the University of Alaska Museum of the North found a lost world, a time of “polar forests with reptiles running around in them.” That’s a description from Patrick Druckenmiller, director of the museum and a paleontologist with the ability to look at river rocks and […]
In June of 1867 — a few months before Alaska would become part of the United States with the transfer of $7.2 million to Russia — William Healey Dall picked up a shiny black rock from a riverbank. Dall was near the mouth of the Nowitna River, which flows into the Yukon River between today’s […]
Now as quiet as wind whispering through grass, a plateau rising from the flats of northern Alaska was for thousands of years a lookout for ancient Alaskans. Those people later vanished, perhaps moving on to populate the Americas. A scientist is using what little they left behind to find out more about those hunters of […]
When Katey Walter Anthony heard rumors of methane, a potent greenhouse gas, ballooning under the lawns of fellow Fairbanks residents, she nearly didn’t believe it. “I ignored it for years because I thought ‘I am a limnologist, methane is in lakes,’” she said. But when a local reporter contacted Walter Anthony, who is a research […]