"Aurora Sensations" to be shown September 7, 2012
“Aurora Sensations,” a film created using time-lapse photography of Alaska auroras set to ambient music, will be featured as part of the First Friday event at Morris Thompson Cultural and Visitors Center in downtown Fairbanks on September 7, 2012. The showings will be continuous from 5 to 8 p.m. in the center’s theatre. Admission is free.
Alaska Science Forum: Signs of life in a place far away
By nrozell [at] gi [dot] alaska [dot] edu (Ned Rozell)
ST. MATTHEW ISLAND — “Oh look, another tooth,” says Dennis Griffin, dressed in raingear and caked with wet soil.
Dry Creek Fire burns south of Fairbanks: UAFSMOKE provides forecasts
The Alaska Interagency Coordination Center is tracking six fires in Alaska. The Dry Creek Fire south of Fairbanks is currently the largest at more than 28,000 acres. According to the center's August 23 morning report, the west flank of the fire is the most active, with "smoldering and isolated torching."
Impressions of a place far away from everywhere
St. Matthew’s Bull Seal Point.
Photo by Ned Rozell.
ST. MATTHEW ISLAND —I’m resting on a mattress of tundra plants that are growing more than 200 miles from the nearest Alaska village. While I have snuck away here to my own private ridge top, eight other people, all scientists, are somewhere on this 30-mile-long wedge of tundra, rocky beaches, lakes and bird cliffs in the central Bering Sea. We nine make up the entire human population of the island.
CRREL permafrost tunnel open house August 18-19, 2012
You have an opportunity to stand in the middle of the ice age. On August 18-19, 2012, the Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory will offer public tours and educational activities at their permafrost tunnel located in Fox, Alaska. Activities run from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. on both Saturday and Sunday.
Alaska Science Forum: Impressions of a place far away from everyone
By nrozell [at] gi [dot] alaska [dot] edu (Ned Rozell)
When reindeer paradise turned to purgatory
Six-thousand reindeer lived here on St. Matthew Island in the Bering Sea in 1963. By the 1980s, zero reindeer remained.
Dave Klein photo.
During World War II, while trying to stock a remote island in the Bering Sea with an emergency food source, the U.S. Coast Guard set in motion a classic experiment in the boom and bust of a wildlife population.
The island was St. Matthew, an unoccupied 32-mile long, four-mile wide sliver of tundra and cliffs in the Bering Sea, more than 200 miles from the nearest Alaska village.
The most remote spot in Alaska
The most remote spots in Alaska.
By Dorte Dissing.
“Out of the million square miles of basin, range, peaks and prairies that compose the interior West, the farthest it’s possible to be from a road is a trifling 28 miles.”
Richard Forman, a Harvard professor of landscape ecology, once visited a mangrove swamp in the Florida Everglades that he described as the most remote place in the eastern U.S. The swamp was 17 miles from any road.
A voyage to St. Matthew
Least auklets on St. Matthew Island, 1984.
U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service photo.
Fifty-five summers ago, when Dave Klein first stepped on St. Matthew
Island, driftwood on the beaches held no plastic bottles and hundreds of
reindeer roamed the tundra hills.
When the 85-year-old naturalist returns next week for his sixth trip to
one of the most remote islands of the world, he knows he’ll see lots of
plastic and no reindeer, along with some changes he can’t yet imagine.
“It’s such a fabulous place,” he said.
Klein, along with a group of scientists and one non-scientist (me!), are
