Archaeologist creates a field guide to coffee cans
Bureau of Land Management archaeologist Steve Lanford with a Hills Bros. coffee can.
BLM photo by Craig McCaa.
The year is 1905. You are a prospector in Alaska relaxing in your cabin after a chilly day of working the tailings pile. Craving a cup of joe, you pull a tin of coffee off the shelf. Though you can
Rediscovering the "tastefully rotten"
A Chukotkan family sitting down to enjoy a meat sampler (aged walrus, aged seal, whale skin fat) with fermented seal oil (in a cup to the left of the tray) being used as dipping sauce.
Photo by Sveta Yamin-Pasternak
While processing backyard chickens last summer, Sveta Yamin-Pasternak thought how nice it would be to bury those fresh carcasses in the ground and let microorganisms preserve her food the easy way.
Willow rose hosts insect drama within
A willow rose, formed by an insect.
Photo by Tommi Nyman, University of Eastern Finland
From the more-you-look-the-more-you-see file, I present the willow rose.
The willow rose is lovely, green and unexpected, its whirled petals gracing the top of Alaska willows lik
Rain curses, graces Alaska landscape
A raindrop at rest in the boreal forest.
Photo by Ned Rozell.
Rain. At this point in the brief Alaska summer, you may not be its greatest fan, especially if you live in Eagle, where rain has twice within a month eaten your road connection to the rest of North
Jet streams, wet weather, and floods
A crane operator removes debris from the floodgates at the Chena River Lakes Flood Control Project in August 2008.
Photo by Ned Rozell.
In 1967 the Chena River spilled over its banks and flooded Fairbanks. For more than a week, the city core was underwater, and the town became a lake more than five miles wide. The flood forced thou
Dry wood is good wood
A split birch log develops cracks through which moisture escapes.
Ned Rozell photo.
A friend says that among his most satisfying moments are those he stands contemplating his pile of firewood. He inhales the sweetness of birch, the tang of aspen and the sharp bite of spruce while
The largest black spruce in Alaska
The largest black spruce tree in Alaska lives on the University of Alaska Fairbanks campus. Forester Tom Malone stands beside the tree.
Ned Rozell photo.
Forester Tom Malone once guided me on a trek to see Alaska’s largest black spruce tree. It was a short adventure. The 71-foot tree is a two-minute walk from my office.
The
The killing field of northern Alaska
Scientists work at a dinosaur bone quarry on Alaska’s North Slope. This site has yielded a large amount of horned dinosaur bones and bones from other dinosaurs, such as hadrosaurs and theropods.
Photo by Tony Fiorillo.
On a fine spring day about 70 million years ago, a few dozen duck-billed dinosaurs waded a channel of a great northern river. As they strode on two legs into the cloudy water, the man-size hadrosau
A friend remembers Ted Stevens' advocacy for Alaska science
The late U.S. Senator Ted Stevens with Syun-Ichi Akasofu, founder of the International Arctic Research Center.
Photos courtesy of Syun-Ichi Akasofu.
When Syun-Ichi Akasofu first approached Ted Stevens, the Japanese-American leader of the University of Alaska Fairbanks’ Geophysical Institute was desperate — the institute's rocket ra
Laser light, GPS, Subaru used for precise glacier measurement
Geophysical Institute graduate student Austin Johnson, left, and glacier researcher Chris Larsen install a GPS laser system on top of Larsen’s Subaru Legacy on the UAF campus.
Photo by Ned Rozell
As Chris Larsen drives his 1997 Subaru Legacy wagon around the University of Alaska Fairbanks campus, the jutting apparatus bolted to his car’s roof rack draws a few stares.
<
