Dead crowns in the canopy and rusty-colored branches are woven in with the otherwise healthy, green temperate rainforest. About a third of the trees around here were hit by the voracious sawfly. The larvae get mistaken for caterpillars. Adults are a kind of non-stinging wasp, a little smaller than a pinky finger.
This November in Utqiaġvik was the hottest on record, averaging 17.2°F. It was so warm that NOAA's quality control algorithms flagged the data. “When we look out on the ocean right now we see a few icebergs,” Thomas said. “Normally we would see white to the horizon in the past, and in this case we’re seeing dark water to the horizon.”
"It was pretty crazy how much water just kind of showed up," said Michelle St. Martin, whose field season was cut short by melting sea ice.
An early melt-out date can make for an especially bad wildfire season, but this year, it’s right on schedule for much of the state. Listen now
There are plenty of seals in Unalaska, but ringed seals -- who make their homes on the ice -- are rare.
While reproductive failure is common for some species like black-legged kittiwakes, it isn’t for murres. In some places less than one percent of the chicks survived.
According to Alyeska Pipeline Service Company, approximately 400 gallons of an oily water mix had been recovered from the Port of Valdez as of Saturday night.
Scientists are trying out crowdsourcing to comb through pictures looking for sea lions.
A five-acre fire destroyed one home in Haines and spread to State Forest land Monday night. The National Forest Service is flying in Tuesday evening to aid the local volunteer fire department.
Officials are still examining the substance in a lab to determine what it is, but DEC suspects it’s black tar or asphalt.
One ecologist wonders, for the yellow cedar forests and the people who care about them, what comes after climate change and environmental loss in Southeast Alaska?
"These ridges that we’re standing on, there would have been more of them, and they would have been bigger," ice researcher Andy Mahoney said. "The features that we now see, they’re something of a shadow from the past." Listen now
“It’s an area that I and some other colleagues have started thinking about: can you get methane forming in terrestrial environments? But it’s a very new area of science,” carbon scientist Katey Walter Anthony said.
Scientists found an enriched uranium particle over the Aleutian Islands and don’t know where it came from.
Typically, cholera is associated with tropical destinations. But recently, the bacteria that can cause the disease was found in subsistence herring eggs in British Columbia. As Southeast Alaska tribes get ready to gather herring eggs, it’s left some people wondering about the future.
The Baldwin Peninsula near Kotzebue has seen a massive increase in beavers over the last two decades, according to new research from the University of Alaska Fairbanks.
The Arctic’s like an air conditioner or refrigerator for the global climate...And as the Arctic warms, partly because the sea ice is going away, it’s like you’re opening that refrigerator door.
On Tuesday night, the state of Alaska saw thousands of lightning strikes. “Most of the 3,800 lightning strikes were concentrated in the Northwest Arctic,” said BLM Alaska Fire Service spokeswoman Beth Ipsen. There are several communities in close proximity to new fires.
Biologists are investigating a surprising connection between two animals that aren’t exactly well loved in parts of Southeast. Gustavus locals suspect wolves are picking off deer at a popular hunting spot on an island near the mainland.
Researchers from the University of Washington used 80 years of data to figure out how much warming fish could withstand. They discovered fish in the tropics are already living in water at the upper end of their threshold.
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