Northwest Passage rowers Denis Barnett and Paul Gleeson row their ocean-going craft into their stopping point of Cambridge Bay, Nunavut.

Photo courtesy MainStream Last First.

Beavers and jet skis surprised four adventurers on their recent attempt to row through the Northwest Passage. Vancouver, British Columbia residents Kevin Vallely, Paul Gleeson, Frank Wolf and Denis Barnett are now back home after the team stopped short of its goal of gliding through the northern waterway on muscle power.

The SS Manhattan on its 1969 journey from Pennsylvania through the Northwest Passage to Alaska and then back to New York.

Merritt Helfferich photo.

Forty-six years ago, a ship long as the Empire State Building sailed with intention toward obstacles that captains usually avoid. The icebreaking tanker SS Manhattan was an oil company’s attempt to see if it might be profitable to move new Alaska oil to the East Coast by plowing through the ice-clogged Northwest Passage.

Cathy Cahill holds a carbon-fiber AeroVironment Raven she will use to sample plumes of hazy air.

Photo by Ned Rozell.

On a cool spring morning in the mountains of southwest Washington, 12-year old Cathy Cahill helped her dad plant scientific instruments around the base of trembling Mount St. Helens. A few days later, the volcano blew up, smothering two of his four ash collectors. When he gathered the surviving equipment, Cathy’s father found a downwind sampler overflowing with ash laced with chlorine. Tom Cahill of the University of California, Davis, wrote a paper on this surprising result; editors at the journal Science were impressed enough to publish it.

Geologists examine large cracks in the ground formed by the 2002 magnitude 7.9 Denali fault earthquake, which was strongly felt in Fairbanks and Anchorage.

Photo Courtesy Peter Haeussler, USGS.

Red and blue waves triggered by a magnitude 4.6 earthquake rippled outward from the Anchorage area and fizzled out after 45 seconds. Except in Cook Inlet basin, where the waves were trapped for another half-minute, bouncing back and forth, up and down, within the 7.5-kilometer-thick sedimentary basin.

“It’s like throwing a rock in the pond. Except water is a homogeneous material. In the solid earth you have basins and mountains and other variations,” said Carl Tape, a seismologist and assistant professor at the University of Alaska Fairbanks.

SAN FRANCISCO — Northern sea ice is at its lowest summer coverage since we’ve been able to see it from satellites. Greenland experienced its warmest summer in 170 years. Eight of 10 permafrost-monitoring sites in northern Alaska recorded their highest temperatures; the other two tied record highs.

2012 was a year of “astounding” change for much of the planet north of the Arctic Circle, said four experts at a press conference here at the Fall Meeting of the American Geophysical Union, a five-day gathering of more than 20,000 scientists that ended Dec. 7, 2012.

George Divoky, left, talks with Geoff Haines-Stiles at the 2012 Fall Meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco.

Photo by Ned Rozell.

SAN FRANCISCO — From a lecture hall within a land of warm breezes and flowering December plants comes a story of a creature 2,600 miles north, where the sun will not rise for another 50 days.

Hans Nielsen of UAF’s Geophysical Institute speaks about capturing images of red sprites above thunderstorms at a press conference during last year’s Fall Meeting of the American Geophysical Institute in San Francisco. Almost 20,000 scientists attended the five-day meeting in 2011.

Photo by Ned Rozell.

A few people contacted me after a column I wrote on time zones a while back. Flip Todd of Anchorage called to say Yakutat clocks displayed a different time than those anywhere else in Alaska prior to 1983. Back then, before Alaska went to the current two-time-zone system, Yakutat followed Yukon time, one hour removed from both Juneau and Anchorage. Flip also corrected my misspelling, in a later column, of the Takotna River.

Alaska sled dogs like this one can adapt on the fly to extreme exercise.

Ned Rozell photo.

Mike Davis lives in Oklahoma, but he travels to Alaska all the time to work with our greatest athletes.

An Aeryon Scout flies over the shoreline of Prince William Sound near Valdez during an exercise in summer 2011 to check its usefulness in oil spill cleanup assessment.

Photo by Greg Walker.

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.