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
Alaska Science Forum: A voyage to St. Mathew
bynrozell [at] gi [dot] alaska [dot] edu ( Ned Rozell)
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.
Alaska Science Forum: Standing in the middle of the ice age
by nrozell [at] gi [dot] alaska [dot] edu (Ned Rozell)
FOX, ALASKA — Bison have not thundered through this neighborhood for thousands of years. But there’s one now, Matthew Sturm said, as he pointed to a horn cemented in a cold, dark wall 30 feet beneath the boreal forest.
Moose flies a high-summer Alaska pest
A “moose fly” on the upper Tanana River.
Photo by Ned Rozell.
While boating down the Yukon River during the hottest summer recorded in Alaska (1915, when Fort Yukon reached 100 degrees Fahrenheit), missionary Hudson Stuck wrote about the wildlife that most bothered his party.
“With the failure of a little breeze and the overcasting of the sky, the weather grows oppressively sultry and a swarm of horse-flies, or moose-flies as they are called in these parts, makes appearance — large venomous insects that bite a piece out of one’s flesh when they alight.”
Lab developed Arctic innovations and oddities
A sleeping bag that allowed the user to walk around in a survival situation was one of the developments of the Arctic Aeromedical Laboratory, a Cold War research unit in Fairbanks. Arctic Aeromedical Laboratory photos.
“Cleaning and Sterilization of Bunny Boots.”
“Comparative Sweat Rates of Eskimos and Caucasians Under Controlled Conditions.”
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Mug shot of a wolf, magpie names, goodbye Rat Island
A wolf caught serendipitously on one of Ken Tape’s cameras he set up in northern Alaska to record caribou and ptarmigan migrations this spring.
Image courtesy Ken Tape.
Ken Tape feels that way, after a time-lapse camera he set up in northern Alaska captured a full-frame portrait of a wolf. He shared the image with me, and, now, with you.
