Alaska's fish are very clean By Ned Rozell [fusion_dropcap]T[/fusion_dropcap]hough buffered by many hundreds of miles from the world's industrial centers, the far north is not as pristine as it seems. Scientists have found dioxins in the breast milk of Native women in Canada's Arctic and pesticide in the bark of Alaska trees, but a new [...]
The dominant predator of North America? By Ned Rozell [fusion_dropcap]I[/fusion_dropcap]n the days when Alaska was a vast grassland, a massive bear hunted the treeless plains. Walking on four lean legs, the giant, short-faced bear loomed larger than the biggest brown bear today. A researcher once described the extinct bear as "the dominant predator of North [...]
Bowhead Whales May Be the World's Oldest Mammals By Ned Rozell [fusion_dropcap]W[/fusion_dropcap]hile helping Alaska Native whale hunter Billy Adams cut sections of blubber from a bowhead whale, Biologist Craig George pressed his knife into a deep scar in the whale's skin. Bowhead whales were hunted by commercial whalers for over four centuries, beginning in the [...]
Bubble Net Feeding by Humpback Whales in Alaska Bubble Net Feeding in Alaska Occasionally, humpback whales in Southeast Alaska will feed in coordinated groups using bubbles to trap fish at the water’s surface. This behavior is known as bubble net feeding. Bubble net feeding involves anywhere from 4-20 whales all working together to herd schooling [...]
What Causes the Aurora Borealis? By Larry Gedney and Vladimir Degen During the early 19th century, some of the best scientific minds of the period believed that the aurora was caused by the reflection of sunlight from tiny ice crystals suspended high in the atmosphere. It remained for the Norwegian physicist Anders Angstrom (1814-1874) to [...]
Salmon nose deep into Alaska ecosystems By Ned Rozell [fusion_dropcap]D[/fusion_dropcap]uring a good year in Bristol Bay, a surge of more than 100 million pounds of sockeye salmon fights its way upstream, spawns, and dies. In Bristol Bay and elsewhere in Alaska, this incredible pulse of salmon carcasses enriches streams and rivers and makes young fish [...]
Alaska Blackfish In A World Of Its Own By Ned Rozell [fusion_dropcap]I[/fusion_dropcap]magine a shallow lake north of Hughes, in the cold heart of Alaska. In frigid, sluggish water, dim blue light penetrates two feet of ice. The ice has a quarter-size hole, maintained by a stream of methane bubbles. Every few minutes, a brutish little [...]
Cities like Seattle are joining with others around the world and taking on goals for green development, while states like Colorado are passing bond initiatives for transit and new requirements for clean energy.
Mastodons long gone from the north By Ned Rozell [fusion_dropcap]A[/fusion_dropcap] long, long time ago, a hairy elephant stomped the northland, wrecking trees and shrubs as it swallowed twigs, leaves and bark. These mastodons left a few scattered teeth and bones in Alaska and the Yukon, reminders of an immense mammal that lived as far south [...]
