LA PEROUSE GLACIER — During our first lunch at a blue-gravel campsite near this Alaska glacier named after a French explorer, scientist Ben Gaglioti and I had a visitor. As we sat on bleached slabs of wood, I held in my left hand a rectangular cracker with peanut butter smeared on top. We heard a […]
The ice shelf on Antarctica’s Pine Island Glacier lost about one-fifth of its area from 2017 to 2020, mostly in three dramatic breaks. The timelapse video incorporates satellite images from January 2015 to March 2020. For most of the first two years, the satellite took high-resolution images every 12 days; then for more than […]
JOINT BASE ELMENDORF-RICHARDSON, Alaska — Alaska Air and Army National Guardsmen rescued 12 stranded mountaineers on Klutlan Glacier, southeast of Mt. Bona in Wrangell-St Elias National Park, June 1. The rescue response was initiated at 7:55 a.m. on May 29 when the National Park Service requested support from the Alaska Rescue Coordination Center after receiving […]
JOINT BASE ELMENDORF-RICHARDSON, Alaska — Aircrew from the Alaska Army National Guard’s 1st Battalion, 207th Aviation Regiment, rescued a father and his daughter near Knik Glacier after their off-road vehicle was stuck in water Saturday night. The Alaska State Troopers contacted the Alaska Rescue Coordination Center requesting assistance, and they coordinated with the Army Guard’s 207th […]
The Alsek, a world-class rafting river that flows into the Gulf of Alaska from its headwaters in Canada, may soon abandon the lower part of its drainage for a steeper one 15 miles away. The Alsek River starts in the Yukon Territory, flows through British Columbia and then on to Dry Bay in Alaska. It […]
Troopers reported a fatality in an avalanche near the Matanuska Glacier that was called in at 2:11 pm on Saturday afternoon. AST report that the avalanche occurred near the glacier between Palmer and Glennallen. The victim, 40-year-old Erin Lee of Fairbanks, was skiing in the area at the time of the avalanche. She was picked […]
Glaciologist Martin Truffer changed his team’s plan the other day. He and a crew of other scientists were about to travel to Malaspina Glacier — near the elbow of Alaska where Southeast Alaska hinges onto the mainland — but the glacier has wrecked his campsite. “Mark Fahenstock [another team member] looked at velocities of […]
As a few scientists hiked a path between the ice towers of a Southeast Alaska glacier and crashing ocean waves in 2016, they topped a ridge and saw massive tree trunks poking from gravel ahead. The dead, sheared-off rainforest stems pointed toward the ocean like skeletal fingers. In this “ghost forest,” not visible to fisherman […]