Charles Deehr will never forget his first red aurora. On Feb. 11, 1958, Deehr was a student at Reed College in Portland, Ore. He asked a Fulbright student from Norway named Tone to the Portland Symphony that night. They went for a stroll on a golf course after the concert. Looking past the treetops, they […]
About once every other week for as long as you have been alive, zooming space rocks have penetrated the shell of gases surrounding our blue planet. If you happened to be in the right spot and were looking up, you might have seen a fireball in the sky, caused by a supersonic space rock encountering […]
A science cruise led by a University of Alaska Fairbanks researcher to investigate the origin of the Arctic Ocean’s Amerasia Basin has come to an end, with the research vessel Sikuliaq back at Nome after more than seven weeks at sea. The voyage was the Sikuliaq’s northernmost to date. It sailed to just over 79 degrees […]
The glorious paper birch outside the window that has for the past three weeks beamed a sunny glow is losing its luster, one golden coin at a time. The 10,000 solar panels the tree has worn since early spring are releasing their grip without a sound, and spiraling to the forest floor. In deciduous plants, […]
Last week, I wrote about some of the breaks the Geophysical Institute at the University of Alaska Fairbanks has enjoyed during its 75-year existence. Another key for this place where a few dozen researchers study things “from the center of the Earth to the center of the sun” is that its directors have followed the advice of […]
An international research team has retraced the astonishing lifetime journey of an Arctic woolly mammoth, which covered enough of the Alaska landscape during its 28 years to almost circle the Earth twice. Scientists gathered unprecedented details of its life through analysis of a 17,000-year-old fossil from the University of Alaska Museum of the North. By […]