This morning, through the west window, I noticed a flash of white. I looked up from breakfast to see a short-tailed weasel popping from a hole in the snowpack. He was sleek and streamlined and snow-white, except for where his tail looked like he dipped it in black paint. Later, a leggy snowshoe hare bounded […]
Gray whales do things differently. Gray whales look different, swim farther, and fight more fiercely than other whales. They owe their distinctive mottled look to a coat of crustaceans that can weigh up to 400 pounds. Their swim from Alaska to Baja and back may be the longest annual migration of any mammal. And they […]
About 1,000 years ago, Norse explorer Leif Ericson bumped into the New World at Newfoundland. The old world was filling up, with 300,000 people living in the Roman capital of Constantinople. Up here in Alaska, the ancestors of today’s coastal Natives were quietly having one of the more successful runs in human history. The Thule […]
Arctic sea ice appears to have reached a record low wintertime maximum extent for the second year in a row, according to scientists at the NASA-supported National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) and NASA. Every year, the cap of frozen seawater floating on top of the Arctic Ocean and its neighboring seas melts during […]