“We are now facing the prospect of destruction of organized human life on Earth.” Far-right and authoritarian leaders in the U.S. and Russia are pushing the planet toward “the most dangerous point in human history,” renowned scholar Noam Chomsky said in an interview published by The New Statesman Wednesday, pointing to Russia’s war in Ukraine and the planetary […]
Changes will happen decades earlier than previously thought More rain than snow will fall in the Arctic and this transition will occur decades earlier than previously predicted, a new study led by the University of Manitoba (UM) and co-authored by scientists at the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) reports. Projections from the latest […]
Volcanic eruptions are not easy to anticipate. Now, a new paper proposes a way to provide early clues by evaluating magma movement far beneath volcanoes. The Bárdarbunga volcanic system in Iceland began to erupt from a fissure on Aug. 29, 2014. By the time it quit six months later, it had created an almost 33-square-mile lava […]
A total run of 1.4 million sockeye salmon, along with 60,000 Chinooks, are expected to return to the Copper River in 2020, according to the Alaska Department of Fish and Game (ADF&G). The state forecast released on Jan. 28 compared with the recent 10-year average (2010-2019) of 2.1 million wild sockeyes returning to the […]
Across much of Alaska, permafrost is thawing. In most locations of interior and south Alaska, what permafrost exists is protected by the ecosystems around it. Trees, moss and peat shade the ground from summer heat and help slow thaw. At the same time, scientists predict that wildfire seasons in Alaska will increase in duration and […]
By the summer of 2020, a landslide will bury a portion of the road from the Denali National Park entrance to Wonder Lake. That’s the conclusion of Zena Robert, a University of Alaska Fairbanks graduate student who visited the park in summer 2019. Last summer, she did a ground survey of giant blobs of […]
State of Alaska biologists are forecasting a 2020 Togiak sac roe herring harvest of 38,749 tons in purse seine and gillnet sac roe fisheries. The purse seine allocation is set to 30,999 tons, or 80 percent while he gillnet allocation is 7,750 tons, or 20 percent. Biologists noted that the 2020 forecast uses a 20 […]
Alaska state biologists are forecasting a harvest of 12 million pink salmon in Southeast Alaska in 2020. It would represent one-third of the recent 10-year average harvest of 35 million fish, and 60 percent of the average even-year harvest since 2006. Pink salmon that went to sea between 2014 and 2018 returned in numbers below […]