Glaciers no obstacle for Copper River and Northwestern Railway By Ned Rozell [fusion_dropcap]H[/fusion_dropcap]ome of the trans-Alaska oil pipeline, Alaska has been the setting for a few epic engineering battles rendered against nature. The Million Dollar Bridge, standing almost intact on the lower Copper River, is a reminder of another improbable Alaska construction project. Completed in [...]
In Hawaii, Hints of a Giant Alaska Tsunami By Ned Rozell [fusion_dropcap]C[/fusion_dropcap]lues from a crater-like sinkhole on the island of Kauai point back to a giant wave that came from Alaska at about the time European explorers were pushing west, seeing the Mississippi River for the first time. The Makauwahi Sinkhole on the southeast shore [...]
Alaska Rivers Flow Through Mountain Range By Ned Rozell [fusion_dropcap]A[/fusion_dropcap]laska’s landscape has an unusual feature that allows us to enjoy cheap bananas in the Interior and other things that make life possible in the subarctic. The Nenana River, born on the south side of the Alaska Range, makes a u-turn and flows north through the [...]
1946 tsunami survivor shares her story By Ned Rozell [fusion_dropcap]o[/fusion_dropcap]n April 1, 1946, the sea floor ruptured just south of Unimak Island in the Aleutian Islands. Seawater displaced by the giant earthquake sent a 100-foot wave into the Scotch Cape lighthouse on Unimak, destroying the concrete structure and killing the five men inside. They never [...]
The mystery of 53 dead caribou in the Alaska Range By Ned Rozell [fusion_dropcap]F[/fusion_dropcap]orty-two years ago, an Army helicopter pilot flying over a tundra plateau saw a group of caribou. Thinking something looked weird, he circled for a closer look. The animals, dozens of them, were dead. The pilot reported what he saw to the [...]
Tracking Alaska Salmon To Their Birth Streams By Ned Rozell [fusion_dropcap]S[/fusion_dropcap]trontium is a trace element and mineral people use to make glow-in-the-dark paints and toothpaste for sensitive teeth. In research for his college degree, Sean Brennan used strontium’s unique qualities to track salmon in an Alaska river. At Brennan’s Ph.D. defense at the University of [...]
Ancient whalers leave their mark on the north By Ned Rozell [fusion_dropcap]T[/fusion_dropcap]he high arctic is one of the farthest places from most of the 6 billion people on Earth, but Canadian researchers have found that the far north holds some of the oldest evidence of human impact on a lake’s ecosystem. John Smol, of Queen’s [...]
Forecasting Pink Salmon Harvest in Southeast Alaska 2015 Forecast = 54.5 million Pink Salmon Harvest [fusion_dropcap]U[/fusion_dropcap]nderstanding how ocean conditions and climate impact salmon year class strength is an objective of the Auke Bay Laboratories (ABL) Southeast Alaska Coastal Monitoring (SECM) project. The SECM project has collected a time series of indexes that include juvenile salmon [...]
Snow-starved Alaska not the normal state By Ned Rozell [fusion_dropcap]T[/fusion_dropcap] During the first 21 days of November 2014, no recordable snow fell in Anchorage, Juneau or Fairbanks. Over an unusual swath of the state, the ground was frozen, dusty and brown. Even extreme parts of Alaska were in a snow drought. "No manual observation site [...]
Alaska forests in transition By Ned Rozell [fusion_dropcap]I[/fusion_dropcap]n almost every patch of boreal forest in Interior Alaska that Glenn Juday has studied since the 1980s, at least one quarter (and as many as one-half) of the aspen, white spruce and birch trees are dead. “These are mature forest stands that were established 120 to 200 [...]
