It’s early August, 118 miles from the Arctic Circle. Time for a walk to work. The last time I wrote about hiking through the North Campus of the University of Alaska Fairbanks, summer was a puppy crashing into your shin. Now it has a white muzzle. I note this maturity while moving through a nice […]
On top of an ice body more than two miles thick, Chris Polashenski last summer hoped to find a candy wrapper that might have fallen from Carl Benson’s pocket 60 years ago. As he repeated the Alaska glaciologist’s measurements on the Greenland ice sheet, Polashenski realized that six decades of snowfall, windstorms and glacier movement […]
Strontium is a trace element and mineral people use to make glow-in-the-dark paints and toothpaste for sensitive teeth. In research for his college degree, Sean Brennan used strontium’s unique qualities to track salmon in an Alaska river. At Brennan’s Ph.D. defense at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, advisor Matthew Wooller praised Brennan’s ambitious plan and his […]
Each fall, white-crowned sparrows hop off branches in Alaska and begin journeys toward California, Arizona, New Mexico and west Texas. On their trip of several weeks, flying mostly at night, the tiny songbirds may cut back on their sleep by two-thirds. Scientists in Wisconsin discovered the sparrow’s apparent ability to perform while cutting rest with […]
JUNEAU, Alaska — The crew of the Coast Guard Cutter Healy, a polar icebreaker, rescued a man aboard a sailboat trapped in Arctic ice approximately 40 miles northeast of Barrow, Saturday. The crew of the Healy broke a 12 mile path through the Arctic ice with the sailboat, Altan Girl, in tow and led it […]
Sea ice in summer looks dramatically different than sea ice in winter, even in the polar Arctic. Summer snowmelt, pools of water on thinning ice and exposed ocean replace vast winter expanses of white snow-covered ice – and this weekend NASA’s high-flying laser altimeter begins a campaign to investigate these features. Icy areas look […]
Alaska’s landscape has an unusual feature that allows us to enjoy cheap bananas in the Interior and other things that make life possible in the subarctic. The Nenana River, born on the south side of the Alaska Range, makes a u-turn and flows north through the mountains. With it comes a wide, low corridor that […]
Senator Lisa Murkowski today continued to advocate for Arctic investment with her colleagues on the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Homeland Security. While discussing the Fiscal Year 2015 Homeland Security funding bill, Murkowski insisted that the committee focus more on Arctic issues like maritime commerce, natural resource development, Coast Guard search and rescue, and the critical […]
Slicing through the top quarter of the Alaska map, the Arctic Circle marks the boundary of perpetual light. North of the line, the sun won’t set on summer solstice. But somehow the breezy, treeless tundra of Barrow has a more arctic feel than Fort Yukon, also poleward of the line but home to dense spruce […]