A CLIFF NORTH OF LITUYA BAY — Dan Mann hands me a clump of orange dirt the size of an almond. He instructs me to put it in my mouth. “What’s it taste like? Does it crunch? Ash crunches because there’s glass fragments in it.” “It crunches.” “It’s from Mount Edgecumbe,” he says, referring to […]
An unmanned aircraft owned and operated by the University of Alaska Fairbanks flew from the general aviation area of Fairbanks International Airport on Sunday, a historic feat in the effort to safely incorporate such aircraft into controlled airspace. The flight was the first civilian large drone operation from an international airport in Alaska. Taking off from […]
Because of where Southeast Alaska sits — at the wetted lips of the planet’s widest expanse of blue — it is often soaked by atmospheric rivers, firehoses of moisture flowing up from the tropics. And even though the forests and muskegs of Southeast Alaska have evolved to drink up and shed stunning amounts of rain, […]
A NASA Black Brant IX sounding rocket soared high out of Poker Flat Research Range north of Fairbanks at 2:27 a.m. Saturday to learn more about pulsating aurora. The Loss through Auroral Microburst Pulsations, or LAMP, experiment seeks to determine whether the pulsating aurora is connected to another phenomenon called microbursts, higher-energy electrons from the Earth’s magnetosphere driven […]