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 [...]
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 [...]
