Gary Chayalkun, a student from Chevak, releases a Tundra Swan that is probably on its way back to Alaska now.

Photo courtesy Craig Ely.

During the next month, while many of us are sleeping, Alaska’s population will increase by millions. The migrant birds are returning, and, thanks to tracking technology that gets better each

A mature kelp forest offshore of an Aleutian Island that resembles the offshore environment of Kasatochi Island prior to its August 2008 eruption.

Photo by Shawn Harper.

Stephen Jewett has dived in ocean waters from one end of Alaska to the other, but he has never seen an underwater landscape as barren as one he saw last summer.

“Diving off Nome where they were doing offshore dredging (for gold) was close, but nothing compares to what we found around Kasatochi,” said Jewett, who dives as part of his job with the University of Alaska Fairbanks’ School of Fisheries and Ocean Sciences.

A Russian Orthodox church in the village of Koliganek.

Photo by Ned Rozell.

KOLIGANEK — This village in southwest Alaska, so small it doesn’t have its own zip code, is of great interest to Kenji Yoshikawa. It once had permafrost, but he’s not finding it n

“Apun” book cover.

Image courtesy of University of Alaska Press.

Born in Florida and raised in New Mexico, Matthew Sturm somehow became an expert on snow. During the past 30 years, he has traveled thousands of miles on the substance, counted how many grains it takes to cover a football field to a depth of two feet (1 trillion), and has spent so much time lying on his side and squinting through a hand lens that he swears he has seen molecules of water moving through the snowpack.

Now, he has written and illustrated a children’s book on snow.

A ground squirrel.

Photo courtesy of Ben Gaglioti.

One fall day in Interior Alaska, a lion stalked a ground squirrel that stood exposed on a hillside like a foot-long sandwich. The squirrel saw bending blades of grass, squeaked an alarm call, and then dived into its hole. It curled up in a grassy nest. A few months later, for reasons unknown, its heart stopped during hibernation.

Twenty thousand years later, Ben Gaglioti is teasing apart the mummified ground squirrel’s cache in an attempt to better reconstruct what Alaska was like during the days of the mammoth, bison, wild horse and camel.

In Port-au-Prince, Haiti, a multistory building with a concrete roof collapsed during the magnitude 7.0 earthquake in January 2010.

Photo by Rich Koehler.

After a few chaotic, free-form weeks in Haiti, an Alaska geologist reported that he and a team of others didn’t find the rips in the ground they were looking for following the early January e

A glaucous gull summering on Alaska’s North Slope.

Photo by Emily Weiser.

Garbage allows gulls to thrive in the oilfields of northern Alaska, and furry little pikas might be changing their body shapes in response to changes in climate, according to two graduate students

A model Lawrence Martin made of the dynamic Yakutat area.

From the 1912 U.S. Geological Survey paper, “The earthquakes at Yakutat Bay, Alaska, in September, 1899.”

More than a century ago, eight prospectors were panning the glacial sands near Hubbard Glacier when the earth starting shaking and never seemed to stop. A few days later, they had survived a natura

Reindeer of St. Matthew Island in the 1960s, before they disappeared.

Photo by David Klein.

Six thousand reindeer once lived on a remote island in the Bering Sea that was briefly their paradise. In what has become a classic story of wildlife boom and bust, no reindeer live on St. Matthew Island now. Three scientists just looked back at the St. Matthew’s reindeer herd and found that an extreme winter probably pushed the stressed animals to their deaths.