A tidewater glacier calving into Hayes Fiord, on Ellesmere Island in Canada’s Arctic.

Photo by Gabriel Wolken.

The glaciers and ice fields of Canada’s far-north islands have lost enough water over the last few summers to fill three-quarters of Illiamna Lake, Alaska’s largest. This news comes jus

Sea ice made by Marc Mueller-Stoffels, who suspended chunks of fresh-water ice in salty brine at below-zero temperatures. He took this photo of a thin cross-section of ice using a polarizing filter. Individual shapes are ice crystals.

Photo by Marc Mueller-Stoffels

Marc Mueller-Stoffels unscrews the top of a glass jar and invites a visitor to smell the powder inside. A sniff evokes the image of kayaking Prince William Sound or walking a beach in Southeast.

“We call it ‘Instant Ocean,’” he says, returning the lid to the jar.

A parachute and a rocket payload as seen from a small aircraft over northern Alaska the same day the rocket launched from Poker Flat Research Range in Chatanika, Alaska, 170 miles away.

Photo by Ned Rozell.

NEAR ACKERMAN LAKE, NORTHWEST OF VENETIE — “Brian, the chute’s right there,” Chuck Brodell says from the middle seat of a Cessna Caravan.

Brian Lawson, wh

Chena Ridge in Fairbanks on May 18, 2011. Jim Anderson watched this hillside each year for the “faint but distinct green flush” that marked greenup.

Photo by Ned Rozell.

Greenup — the great, silent collective explosion of freed tree buds that had been frozen all winter like a clenched fist — happened yesterday in interior Alaska. I know this because it’s a phenomenon that’s easy to notice here in Fairbanks, which is locked up in black-and-white for much of the year. And because Rick Thoman just told me.

Alaska largest known yedoma, a permafrost feature that formed thousands of years ago and is now being cut by the Itkillik River on Alaska’s North Slope.

Photo by Eva Stephani.

In northern Alaska, an amphitheater of frozen ground is thawing where a northern river is cutting it, exposing walls of ice. The feature, known by scientists as “yedoma,” is the largest

The plume from a 19,000-acre fire near Volkmar Lake in Interior Alaska on May 29, 2011.

Photo by Ned Rozell.

With their mushroom clouds topped with cauliflower crowns, plumes from wildfire smoke are again a common sight in Interior Alaska, which — with barely a sprinkle of rain — just experien

Barbara Truessel of UAF’s Geophysical Institute sets up a time lapse camera near Yakutat Glacier which will become several glaciers because of melting.

Photo by Chris Larsen.

Not long ago, a glaciologist wrote that the number of glaciers in Alaska “is estimated at (greater than) 100,000.” That fuzzy number, perhaps written in passive voice for a reason, might be correct. But it depends upon how you count.

Hubbard Glacier’s advance toward Gilbert Point near Yakutat, as seen by glaciologist Chris Larsen on May 30, 2011.

Photo by Chris Larsen.

With the return of summer, many natural cycles have resumed up north — visiting birds have invaded tundra and forest, salmon torpedo in loose formation up rivers, and Hubbard Glacier again th

The Mesa site on Alaska's North Slope.

Photo courtesy Mike Kunz.

People tend to think of climate change as a recent phenomenon, but Alaska was once the setting for an environmental shift so dramatic it forced people to evacuate the entire North Slope, according to Michael Kunz, an archaeologist with the Bureau of Land Management.

An alder flycatcher.

Photo courtesy of the Alaska Bird Observatory.

Through the darkness of every spring night, millions of tiny bodies flutter and glide to Alaska from every continent on Earth. Here, songbirds find a summer home, mate, build nests, lay eggs, raise