A GREEN PLATEAU NORTH OF LITUYA BAY — “These are museum-class bonsais,” Ben Gaglioti says as we walk through an elfin forest. Gaglioti, a University of Alaska Fairbanks ecologist, has led me into another landscape I have never seen in Alaska. This terrace of spongy ground above the rainforest is home to trees that Dr. […]
Because of where Southeast Alaska sits — at the wetted lips of the planet’s widest expanse of blue — it is often soaked by atmospheric rivers, firehoses of moisture flowing up from the tropics. And even though the forests and muskegs of Southeast Alaska have evolved to drink up and shed stunning amounts of rain, […]
Thanks to a combination of dangerously low temperatures and bitter winds, bone-chilling weather has overtaken the Last Frontier. Bettles, Alaska, located in the north-central part of the state, had a low temperature of 51 degrees below zero Fahrenheit Sunday morning, well below the average of 15 below zero F this time of year. During the […]
“Normally the weather predicts what the fire will do,” said an Oregon official. “In this case, the fire is predicting what the weather will do.” As of Tuesday morning, the Bootleg Fire had burned up more than 364,000 acres across Southern Oregon—becoming so big that not only has it bolstered the case for bold climate action, the fire […]