In early March up on the frozen Arctic Coastal Plain, as the wind sculpts snow into drifts, it’s hard to tell northern lakes from surrounding tundra. But lurking deep beneath that flat white world are toothy predators as long as your arm. In pools 60 feet down, lake trout are somehow passing the long winter. […]
ANCHORAGE, Alaska — Two great bears are emblematic of the Arctic: Ursa Major – arktos in Greek – the constellation from which the Arctic derives its name, and the polar bear, which has lived beneath the northern stars for hundreds of thousands of years. It’s hard to imagine the region without either of them, but […]
SAN FRANCISCO — On rare winter mornings here, a skim of ice forms on sidewalk puddles. But water’s solid form is mostly an abstraction in this land of blooming flowers and the hummingbirds that visit them. Except for the week of the fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union. Dozens of the 22,000 scientists gathering […]
Glaciers and ice sheets move in unique and sometimes surprising patterns, as evidenced by a new capability that uses satellite images to map the speed of flowing ice in Greenland, Antarctica and mountain ranges around the world. With imagery and data from Landsat 8, a joint mission of NASA and the U.S. Geological Survey, […]