A wayward walrus calf, just one month old, was rescued from the North Slope. Workers on the North Slope spotted the baby walrus on tundra, about four miles inland from the Beaufort Sea.

Kenai National Wildlife Refuge staff say the bird is leucistic, lacking pigment in some feathers due to an absence of cells that produce melanin.

In the Glenallen area, Yukon and Kuskokwim River communities, and Northwest Arctic floodwaters caused by snow melt and rapid warming have caused many communities to be flooded.

Officials say the floodwaters are swamping Alaska towns, tearing buildings from foundations, seeping into homes and covering roads. In Glennallen, the local utility is setting up Porta-Potties around the community, and area residents are asked to limit water usage. The state transportation department said there was water over a portion of the Glenn Highway on Monday, but the road remained open.

Snow dumped on Southcentral Alaska this weekend, with more than 8 inches falling in the Anchorage area and about 5 inches in the Matanuska-Susitna Borough. A Climatologist says this weekend has led to a record amount of snowpack this late in the season.

A major winter storm is continuing to bring heavy snow, blizzard conditions and significant ice from California to the Northeast on Thursday.

The female seal pup — estimated to be around six months old — was seen swimming “erratically” near the shore in Sitka last month, according to a press release from the center. Worried Sitka residents then reported the pup to the center’s 24-hour stranding hotline.

The smoke is from numerous wildfires burning in Canada’s Yukon Territory.

Anchorage-based photographer saw something wild — a sudden, bright light on the northern horizon that quickly started to take on a spiral shape as it drew nearer. The spiral “appears to be rocket engine exhaust from a SpaceX Transporter-7 mission that launched on the Falcon 9 about three hours earlier in California.”

Mushers shrugged off jackets and dogs sunbathed in the snow as temperatures hovered around 40 degrees — hot by Alaska winter standards.

Alaska is one of the only places in the world where peony flowers grow in the summer months. But the unusually cold, wet weather this year is delaying the blooms by weeks.

While many Bering Sea crab populations find themselves in freefall, Dungeness crab is breaking records in regions that used to hardly see them.

Breakup of the Yukon River over the weekend has led to serious flooding in Eagle, Circle and Fort Yukon.

Last summer’s unusually warm weather fueled an explosion in the western blackheaded budworm, leaving masses of browning trees in many areas of Southeast. The worm, which is the larval stage of the budworm moth, is known to feed on the new growth of trees, leaving them with a brownish-red appearance.

There were 4,500 lightning strikes in Alaska Tuesday — the latest in a run of days with thousands of ground strikes. There were also another 13 new, primarily lightning sparked wildfires in the state Tuesday, mostly in the Interior. The lightning storms have coincided with very dry conditions.

Orthione griffenis, or O. griffenis, eventually kills its host shrimp, and soon the remaining shrimp can’t find each other to reproduce, rendering a blue mud shrimp population extinct.

All schools in Anchorage and the Mat-Su Borough are closed Wednesday due to slick roads across the region, as snowfall continues. “This is the heaviest snowfall the Anchorage area has seen in over 20 years,” said state Department of Transportation spokesman Justin Shelby. “Our crews are keeping up as best they can.”

Amid severely restricted fishing on the Kuskokwim River, one bright spot has been abundant sockeye salmon runs at 30,000 fish daily near Bethel.

Kwigillingok, a community on the Bering Sea coast of the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta, is used to some flooding during high tides. But in recent years, that flooding has grown more severe, reaching a new threshold last week.

Extreme winds and cold temperatures have affected the areas. At one point over the weekend, 20,000 households in Mat-Su lost power.