Alaska Beat

AK Beat: ADN plans to open Bethel bureau

ADN to station reporter full time in Bethel: Alaska Dispatch News will be opening a Western Alaska news bureau in Bethel this month with a veteran reporter based there full-time. Lisa Demer, who has reported in Alaska for more than 20 years on politics, social issues, resource industries and many other topics, will be based in Bethel. She'll be responsible for covering regional issues and more than 50 communities in the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta. It's the ADN's first full-time rural bureau and part of a long-range effort to increase the volume and depth of rural and statewide coverage. The bureau is expected to be up and running by the end of the August.

High-altitude NASA flights capture Alaska glacier melt water images: Images of melt ponds captured in a recent NASA mission over the far north show the deep turquoise colors created by melted snow atop Alaska ice, reports Live Science. Melt-pond images were taken by a digital camera system that snapped photos every three seconds from a NASA aircraft that flew over Alaska and to the North Pole and back. This NASA mission, employing an instrument called the Multiple Altimeter Beam Experimental Lidar, or MABEL, that measures elevations of glaciers, mountains and other landforms. NASA is seeking to use MABEL to try to better understand Arctic ice conditions. The image featured by Live Science was also selected by NASA's Earth Observatory as its image of the day for Saturday.

Mackey's back: Lance Mackey is the subject of another profile, this one from Greenland news site Arctic Journal. Mackey, who will run the 2015 Iditarod after sitting out last year's race, tells the Arctic Journal that his future holds even more than his already-considerable accomplishments "I am going for the ultimate comeback and I think that what I will do in the next couple of years will exceed what I have already done." Most of the piece will be familiar to Alaska fans who've followed Mackey's ups and downs, and all of it captures his single-minded devotion to the sport: "I am gonna die on the sled, with a smile on my face, not sitting in a hospital," he says. "I am not an inside person. I don't watch TV and I am not going work for someone I don't like. None of us are guaranteed a tomorrow and I am going to do this while my body can hold up."

More than 82 million Alaska salmon caught: Citing the Cordova Times, fishing industry site Undercurrent News reports that Alaska's salmon catch has topped 82 million. Sockeye salmon, at 39.9 million accounted for nearly half that total. Meanwhile, Undercurrent News notes, this year's Fraser River sockeye run, which has long been expected to produce record numbers, kicked off on Saturday. Canada's Department of Fisheries and Oceans also plan to allow a slightly higher percentage of salmon to be harvested this year than in previous years, the report says.

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