On St. Paul Island, in the Bering Sea about 300 miles from Alaska’s coast, the still-powerful remains of Typhoon Merbok passed overhead, churning up the ocean and rolling across the landscape on a path to the Alaska mainland. As the storm hit the small island, three University of Alaska Fairbanks researchers, two graduate students and […]
NEAR GAKONA, ALASKA — In this wild place where dump truck drivers once tipped load after load of gravel onto the moss to make roads and building pads, scientists rolled open an iron gate one recent Saturday afternoon. They invited in conspiracy theorists, reality-TV hosts and salmon fishermen from Chistochina to the grounds of a […]
A University of Alaska Fairbanks scientist wants to find out when the last woolly mammoth fell to the grass in Alaska. He is asking for help from an unusual source: people like you. Matthew Wooller was walking a beach in Florida last winter with his wife and two kids when the adopt-a-mammoth idea struck him. […]
“Lakes seem, on the scale of years or of human life spans, permanent features of landscapes, but they are geologically transitory, usually born of catastrophes, to mature and die quietly.” — George Evelyn Hutchinson, “A Treatise on Limnology,” 1957. Harry Potter Lake did not die quietly. Water in the basin on Alaska’s North Slope cut […]