Unlike all the other days of winter, on December 21, we will neither lose nor gain a second of sunlight here in middle Alaska. The sun arcing over the Alaska Range to the south will follow a path that is almost precisely the same as its track on December 20.
The Arctic Report Card press conference is held annually as part of the American Geophysical Union’s Fall Meeting. This year’s big picture? The Arctic is changing, and those changes won’t stop any time soon.
Syun-Ichi Akasofu has been advancing understanding of the aurora borealis for more than sixty years and was a critical part of the establishment of the International Arctic Research Center at UAF.
A group of researchers have found a sliver of good news in the disappearing sea ice off Alaska’s west coast—the ocean floor around Bering Strait still seems to be capturing billions of bits of carbon that might otherwise lead to an even warmer planet.
Graduate student Michelle Trifari is researching why Stellar sea lions located in the Western Aleutian Islands apparently carry more mercury than those closer to the mainland.
In 2012, an 85-year-old scientist and his son-in-law pulled a cylinder of muck from a faraway island. They carried it home like a newborn baby, froze it, and mailed it to a researcher across the country.
Early in his career, on a wet, windy, foggy night, Guy Tytgat checked into the loneliest hotel in the Aleutians. His room was four feet wide and five feet tall, made of fiberglass, and perched on the lip of a volcanic crater.
Having studied killer whales during her undergraduate work in British Columbia, Stephanie Hayes knew they were witnessing something special.
Until recently, scientists did not know salmon swam up some of these waterways, nor that grizzlies were fattening up on them before entering hibernation.
Pacific banana slugs live on the floor of coastal rain forests all the way south to California. Down there, where frosts are rare as 90 degree days here, the slugs grow long as pencils.