Science

Science writer Ned Rozell, a veteran of more than 20 Equinox Marathon races, embarks on the 2023 race with a heartfelt appreciation of its history.

A researcher’s favorite whale from the population of Glacier Bay humpbacks returned after disappearing during a heat wave where water temperatures increased substantially.

Bad weather forced a trio of researchers to haul in 700 pounds of pontoon boat, sound-wave producing instrument, portable generator and gas cans to Allison Lake, above Valdez.

In revisiting an adventure from a decade ago, science writer Ned Rozell tells the story of a harrowing trip for researchers to the Valley of 10,000 Smokes.

On July 24, automated systems recorded more than 20,000 lightning strikes, which led to a late surge of wildfires after a quiet stretch in early summer.

For years, scientists have believed the Anchorage area isn’t at risk of tsunami because of its location in shallow Upper Cook Inlet. But new research has found a rare confluence of conditions could lead an earthquake-produced tsunami to inundate parts of coastal Anchorage.

The deep ocean off Alaska’s Aleutians is one of the least mapped places in U.S. waters, partly due to its remoteness.

Numbers of adult peregrine falcons on the upper Yukon River have decreased by more than a third in the last three years, according to an Alaska scientist who has counted them there for half a century.

This summer’s proliferation of purple monkshood blossoms has prompted questions among some Alaskans about whether the plant is dangerous to those who come in contact with it.

Now the Alaska Arctic Observatory and Knowledge Hub staff is looking for ways to find more practical applications for the observations’ database.

A pharmacology researcher at the University of Vienna in Austria recently came to Alaska for bog blueberries to sample them for possible toxicity.

While more summer warmth has been linked to beetle infestations in Southcentral Alaska, less winter cold may be at play in and around Denali.

Wild bears like Otis are supposed to return to the salmon run in late June, not July, but rising ocean temperatures and overfishing are in part delaying the arrival of salmon.

There won’t be two supermoons in the same month again until 2037.

In returning to Fireweed rock glacier near McCarthy this summer, a group of scientists cleaned up a site they had left more than two decades ago.

A rock glacier — examples of which can be found in the Brooks and Alaska ranges and in the Wrangell Mountains — is a stream of rocks held together with ice.

The horde of worms stretched the length of two football fields and was thick enough to cover the seafloor like shag carpet in spots.

The damage wrought to the park’s road by melting permafrost is creating a new reality affecting visitors, park staff, local businesses and potentially wildlife.

George, who was 70 at the time of a rafting accident earlier this month, was a retired biologist with the North Slope Borough and a world expert on bowhead whales.

George Plafker had the rare opportunity to visit and study villages and unoccupied islands in Prince William Sound after the 9.2 earthquake in 1964.

A large cache of fossils is being carbon dated in an attempt to find the most recent mammoth — extinct for thousands of years — that existed on mainland Alaska.

Keith Mather, former director of UAF’s Geophysical Institute, researched what causes washboard roads to form and found that there aren’t many preventive measures available.

With a ferocity that has been noted in the annals of history, there are an estimated 17 trillion mosquitoes hovering above Alaska each summer.