KODIAK, Alaska — The Coast Guard rescued three jet boaters Sunday whose boats had become stuck in ice, approximately five miles northeast of Hole in the Wall Glacier on the Taku River. An Air Station Sitka MH-60 Jayhawk helicopter crew hoisted all three boaters at about 8 p.m. from jet boats that were stuck […]
The rapidly melting Malaspina Glacier in southeastern Alaska’s Wrangell-St. Elias National Park could create a new ocean bay, one feature in what may be the largest landscape transformation underway in the United States. To better understand these changes, the National Science Foundation recently awarded researchers from the University of Alaska Fairbanks and two partner […]
In May of 2020, local geologists identified a steep, unstable slope that has the potential to become a tsunami-generating landslide in Barry Arm, a glacial fjord 60 miles east of Anchorage, Alaska. With documented cases of tsunami-generating landslides in Alaska including Lituya Bay in 1958 and Taan Fjord in 2015, this new hazard immediately caught the attention of […]
Konrad Steffen, 68, died Aug. 8, 2020, when he fell into a meltwater-filled crevasse on the Greenland ice sheet. The glaciologist never worked in Alaska, but Steffen’s work influenced a scientist here, his countryman Martin Truffer. Truffer was born in Switzerland, as was Steffen. Truffer, a professor who studies glaciers at the Geophysical Institute […]