A scientist named Victor Hessler once made an aurora detector by driving two metal rods in the ground a few hundred feet apart and stringing a wire between them. When voltage changed along the wire, a bell rang. Hessler then pulled on his boots and went outside to take black-and-white aurora photos. During the recent […]
North America’s highest mountain should be a volcano. Denali sits about 60 miles above where the Pacific Plate grinds beneath the North American plate, as do Iliamna, Redoubt and Augustine. If you draw a line from the Aleutians to volcanic features in interior Alaska, the curve goes over Denali’s summit. Like its neighbors in the […]
“Rectal Temperature of the Working Sled Dog.” “Cleaning and Sterilization of Bunny Boots.” “Comparative Sweat Rates of Eskimos and Caucasians Under Controlled Conditions.” These are some of the studies completed by scientists who worked for the Arctic Aeromedical Laboratory from the late 1940s to the 1960s. Developed during the Cold War to “solve the severe […]
One foggy day on St. Paul Island, a woolly mammoth stepped onto a trapdoor of greenery. It plunged thirty feet to the floor of a cave. There was no exit. A few thousand years later, a scientist who descended by ladder found the mammoth’s tooth amid the bones of other mammoths, polar bears, caribou, reindeer […]