A 2,500-mile, 16-day research cruise that began Thursday in Seward and concludes in Nome aims to advance environmental research in coastal Alaska through a novel addition: public tours of the research vessel when it makes port calls. The Convergence Research Cruise on the research vessel Sikuliaq is a part of the four-year ACTION project, a […]
Second reported sighting in eastern North Pacific waters south of the Aleutian Island chain. A new scientific paper discusses the first NOAA Fisheries record of a bowhead whale in Southeast Alaska. It is only the second documented sighting of this Arctic species in the eastern North Pacific, south of the Aleutian Islands. The whale was observed by […]
June began cool and wet but rapidly changed to hot and dry at the midpoint, with wildfires bursting out across the state, according to the monthly summary from the Alaska Climate Research Center. The month also saw the first issuance of the new “heat advisory” by the National Weather Service. Unusually hot weather was previously noted […]
Analysis of bowhead whale poop shows that more toxins from typically warm-water toxic algae species are entering Arctic food webs as northern oceans warm and lose sea ice. The findings are based on nearly 20 years of feces samples collected from bowhead whales harvested for subsistence purposes by Alaska Native people living on the Beaufort […]