Ned Rozell in the late 1980s on Canwell Glacier in the Alaska Range;

Photo by Ned Rozell

Not too long ago, I passed a milestone that doesn’t really mean much, but is a nice round number. Twenty-five years ago, I drove a Ford Courier pickup from upstate New York to Fairbanks, Alaska. I rolled into town in August, started college in September, and have lived here ever since.

Guido Grosse and Benjamin Jones drill a hole through the ice of Teshekpuk Lake on a recent mission to learn more about lakes in the Arctic.

Photo by Chris Arp.

Minnesota is the Land of 10,000 Lakes, but Alaska has more than that in the great expanse of flatlands north of the Brooks Range. These ubiquitous far-north bodies of water — most of them formed by the disappearance of ancient, buried ice that dimples the landscape as it thaws — make the maps of Alaska’s coastal plain look like Swiss cheese.

Sunshine is returning to the north with the spring equinox.

Ned Rozell photo.

My thermometer here in Fairbanks is stuck on single digits today, but the height of the sun and a quick online check informs me that this is indeed the spring equinox. We will experience daylight for half the day, which was beyond imagining when the sun was two fingers above the Alaska Range in December.

Men in the village of Venetie listen to NASA officials describe a program that will reward them for coordinates of rocket parts that have landed on their tribal lands over the years.

Photo by Ned Rozell.

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.

Kasatochi Island, pictured here one year after its 2008 eruption, is experiencing some of the fastest erosion on the planet, with about 3 feet of its muddy shoreline eaten away each day.

Photo by Ned Rozell.

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:

A concrete foundation is all that remains of Shaktoolik’s old school, abandoned after the village moved to a new site about 70 years ago.

Photo by Aaron Cooke

In Alan Weisman’s book, “The World Without Us,” the author ponders “a world from which we all suddenly vanished. Tomorrow.”

The great Anaktuvuk River tundra fire of 2007.

Photo by Michelle Mack.

Four summers ago, Syndonia Bret-Harte stood outside at Toolik Lake,
watching a wall of smoke creep toward the research station on Alaska’s
North Slope. Soon after, smoke oozed over the cluster of buildings.

“It was a dense, choking fog,” Bret-Harte said.