Press Releases
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Some places in this world are just too dirty, dull or dangerous for human pilots to fly. An airspace in the latter category is anywhere near gas flares in Alaska’s oilfields. With only a few seconds of warning, flames blast high in the air from a network of pipes, releasing the stress of sucking oil from deep in the ground. 
SAN FRANCISCO — For the thirteenth straight year, I’m happy to be spending one week of December here, at the Fall Meeting of the American Geophysical Union, where more than 15,000 scientists gather for a week to discuss the latest news of the world.
Alfred Brooks was a geologist who traveled thousands of miles in Alaska and left his name on the state’s northernmost mountain range. Twenty years before his death in 1924, he also left behind a summary of what Alaska was like over a century ago, when “large areas (were) still practically unexplored.”
While running through Bicentennial Park in Anchorage, biologist Jessy Coltrane spotted a porcupine in a birch tree. On her runs on days following, she saw it again and again, in good weather and bad. Over time, she knew which Alaska creature she wanted to study.
In 1973, Elden Johnson was a young engineer with a job working on one of the most ambitious and uncertain projects in the world — an 800-mile steel pipeline that carried warm oil over frozen ground. Thirty-five years later, Johnson looked back at what he called “the greatest story ever told of man’s interaction with permafrost.”
Home of the trans-Alaska pipeline, Alaska has been the setting for a few epic engineering battles rendered against nature. The Million Dollar Bridge, spanning the lower Copper River, is a reminder of another improbable Alaska construction project.
One of the prettiest places in Southeast Alaska has felt some of nature’s most violent behavior.
The latest meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco in December 2011 featured hundreds of talks about Earth science, some of those relating to Alaska (and some of those comprehensible to a non-scientist). Here are a few items from the notebook I carried around the Moscone Center:
Alaska scientist Davis “Dave” Sentman died in December 2011. The man who named “sprites,” colorful discharges that burst upward from thunderclouds, was 66 years old.
VENETIE — The cozy log structure smells of coffee, gasoline, and spruce logs burning in a stove made from a 55-gallon drum. Inside the building that serves as the Village Council headquarters for Venetie, Josh Bundick explains a new policy that rewards villagers who find spent rocket parts launched from north of Fairbanks.
