A GREEN PLATEAU NORTH OF LITUYA BAY — “These are museum-class bonsais,” Ben Gaglioti says as we walk through an elfin forest. Gaglioti, a University of Alaska Fairbanks ecologist, has led me into another landscape I have never seen in Alaska. This terrace of spongy ground above the rainforest is home to trees that Dr. […]
A group of University of Alaska Fairbanks faculty, students and staff has been conducting Arctic fieldwork in Utqiagvik since mid-April to measure snowmelt, but the melt only started in mid-June. This is an exceptionally late melt year. The Snow Albedo Evolution in the Arctic team, or SALVO, has been working hard through the midnight sun, […]
OVER THE NORTH PACIFIC OCEAN — To the woman wearing earbuds and sitting next to me in seat 7E: I’m sorry; I did not get to shower before boarding the plane after 12 days of accompanying four scientists in the hills north of Lituya Bay. I will try to keep my arms pinned to my […]
More areas of year-round unfrozen ground have begun dotting Interior and Northwest Alaska and will continue to increase in extent due to climate change, according to new research by University of Alaska Fairbanks Geophysical Institute scientists. The scientists said the spread of taliks — volumes of unfrozen ground within areas of permafrost — has major […]