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 [...]
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 [...]
NOAA selects Alaska’s Kachemak Bay as focus for habitat initiative Designation part of watershed effort to rebuild fisheries, improve coastal habitat [fusion_dropcap]N[/fusion_dropcap]OAA is designating Kachemak Bay, Alaska, as its next Habitat Focus Area. Kachemak Bay, located in southern Cook Inlet, is valuable for its recreational, subsistence, and commercial fishing, marine transportation, tourism, and threatened and [...]
Alaska is Ground Zero for Global Warming Studies By Elizabeth Weise - USA Today [fusion_dropcap]T[/fusion_dropcap]o the untrained eye, Bonanza Creek forest is breathtaking, a vibrant place alive with butterflies and birds, with evidence of moose and bear at every turn. But look through forest ecologist Glenn Juday's eyes, and you see a dying landscape. Since [...]
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 [...]
