1946 tsunami survivor shares her story

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 [...]

Tracking Alaska Salmon To Their Birth Streams

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

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 [...]

Snow-starved Alaska not the normal state

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

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 [...]

The Wooly Mammoth Mystery of St. Paul Island

The Wooly Mammoth Mystery of St. Paul Island By Ned Rozell [fusion_dropcap]O[/fusion_dropcap]ne foggy day on St. Paul Island, a woolly mammoth stepped onto a trapdoor of greenery. It plunged thirty feet to the floor of a cave. There was no exit. A few thousand years later, a scientist who descended by ladder found the mammoth's [...]

Fat the only fuel for migrating Alaska salmon

Fat the only fuel for migrating Alaska salmon By Ned Rozell [fusion_dropcap]A[/fusion_dropcap]s you read this, salmon are darting through the deep blue ocean off Alaska, eating everything they can catch. Some of those brilliant silver fish are packing on fat to power them 1,500 miles up the Yukon, past Eagle and well into Canada. They [...]

Removing the mystery from Alaska’s washboard roads

Removing the mystery from Alaska's washboard roads By Ned Rozell [fusion_dropcap]W[/fusion_dropcap]hile driving Alaska's graveled highways, countless people have no doubt wondered about how an unpaved road surface turns into a bouncing bed of corduroy. Keith Mather, who was studying nuclear physics in Australia in the early 1960s, had the same question. He wrote a paper [...]