Background Articles

At least 30 houses still needed repairs, cleanup was ongoing, and the city’s residents grappled with the need to fix snowmachines, keep their soaked houses warm and prepare for future emergencies.

Landslides have killed at least 12 Alaskans in the past decade and destroyed homes and critical infrastructure.

Ahead of Wednesday’s anticipated severe weather, county officials are making some important announcements.

The Mississippi Emergency Management Agency (MEMA) has issued an updated damage report from Tuesday and Wednesday’s severe weather. According to MEMA, one person in Grenada County died. Six were injured, two of which were in Scott County. Details regarding where the other four injuries took place have not been released...

The U.S. experiences extreme cold as the rest of the world faces unusual warmth, a pattern scientists attribute to climate change.

Alaska communities are facing significant challenges due to climate change, including the disappearance of snow crabs, threats to subsistence hunting and fishing, and difficulties in processing and storing food, but some communities are taking action and developing local climate adaptation plans with the support of funding and collaboration between different governments and agencies.

Extreme weather events like Typhoon Merbok are becoming more common, and many Alaska communities are wondering about the future.

Rick Thoman is thinking hard about the cost of climate change and the benefits of better tracking, potentially influencing Alaska’s response to extreme weather and more.

The state’s rural areas lead the world in renewably powered microgrids. So if the grid of the future is being incubated in rural Alaska, can urban Alaska, like the Railbelt, benefit from some of these strategies and lessons learned?

A long-running television show, "Alaska Weather" unique to Alaska that provides detailed weather, aviation and marine forecasts across the state will stop airing at the end of June. Especially in rural communities where many residents rely on the show for weather and safety information that's vital to coordinating flights and planning subsistence hunts or commercial fishing trips.

All the birds were gone. Now there is full life in the bird cliffs again. The researchers believe they have found the explanation for the mystery.

Climate change has been observed for hundreds of years by the plant specialists of three Odawa Tribes in the Upper Great Lakes along Lake Michigan. Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore is the focus of two National Park Service (NPS) studies of Odawa Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) of plants, ecosystems, and climate change. Data collected during these studies contributed to developing Plant Gathering Agreements between tribes and parks. This analysis derived from 95 ethnographic interviews conducted by University of Arizona (UofA) anthropologists in partnership with tribal appointed representatives. Odawa people recognized in the park 288 plants and five habitats of traditional and contemporary concern. Tribal representatives explained that 115 of these traditional plants and all five habitats are known from multigenerational eyewitness accounts to have been impacted by climate change. The TEK study thus represents what Native people know about the environment. These research findings are neither intended to test their TEK nor the findings of Western science.

World leaders already have many options to reduce greenhouse gas pollution and protect people, according to the United Nations report.

In addition to blizzard conditions, Kotzebue residents have been experiencing power outages, water service interruptions and travel complications because of the storms.

Garbage and wood were removed by the municipal services of the village of Rytkuchi of the Pevek urban district from the coastline and tundra near the settlement. This was the final stage of a large-scale clean-up, which began in the summer after a strong storm.

Three weeks after ex-typhoon Merbok hit Western Alaska and breached the Nome-Council Road, Department of Transportation crews and local contractors finished their repairs.

Golovin was hurt worse than other places in the Norton Sound region by the remnants of typhoon Merbok as it swirled up through Bering Sea last weekend. Repairing the damage is going to take time — and the clock is ticking on winter’s arrival.

The powerful remnants of Typhoon Merbok pounded Alaska’s western coast on Sept. 17, 2022, pushing homes off their foundations and tearing apart protective berms as water flooded communities. Storms aren’t unusual here, but Merbok built up over unusually warm water. Its waves reached 50 feet over the Bering Sea, and its storm surge sent water levels into communities at near record highs along with near hurricane-force winds.

If that saying about Jan. 1 setting the tone for the year to come has any truth to it, 2022 is going to be a wild ride.