Science for Alaska 2013
Mark your calendars for Science for Alaska 2013! Our 21st year of the popular lecture series will experience some changes. Lectures will take place in Schaible Auditorium on the UAF campus and occur on Saturdays throughout January. We're hoping the smaller space and the coffee to follow each of the lectures will lead to a more intimate exchange between our line-up of lecturers and the community.
Dramatic report card for the Arctic in 2012
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.
TemperatureAlaska Science Forum: Forty years of change on top of the world
By nrozell [at] gi [dot] alaska [dot] edu (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.
Alaska Science Forum: Dramatic report card for the Arctic in 2012
By nrozell [at] gi [dot] alaska [dot] edu (Ned Rozell)
Northern sea ice is at its lowest extent 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.
Yakutat time, correcting some errors, big meeting in San Francisco
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 Science Forum: Yakutat time, correcting some errors, big meeting in San Francisco
By nrozell [at] gi [dot] alaska [dot] edu (Ned Rozell)
Alaska Science Forum: Goodbye to a giant of glacier research
By nrozell [at] gi [dot] alaska [dot] edu (Ned Rozell)
High-school dropout Austin Post’s career began in the 1950s, when colleagues made up the title “Senior Meteorologist” to include him in a funding proposal.
Alaska Science Forum: Ancient skeletons of McGrath raise questions
By nrozell [at] gi [dot] alaska [dot] edu (Ned Rozell)
The room smelled of a smoked moosehide covering a table that held birch-bark baskets and a white box rimmed with beadwork flowers. Inside the box were the smooth bones of an adult man, a teenager and a child dug up within sight of the McGrath School.
Ancient skeletons of McGrath raise questions
Alaska State Trooper Jack LeBlanc and forensic archaeologist Joan Dale, both on their knees, unearth part of a human skull in McGrath. Standing in the background, with the McGrath School behind them, are, from left, Brant Dallas, Lucky Egress and Betty Magnuson.
Photos by Kevin Whitworth, MTNT, Limited.
The room smelled of a smoked moosehide covering a table that held birch-bark baskets and a white box rimmed with beadwork flowers. Inside the box were the smooth bones of an adult man, a teenager and a child dug up within sight of the McGrath School.
The discovery, recently announced in the Morris Thompson Cultural and Visitors Center in Fairbanks, is unique because bones don’t often last long when buried in the acidic soil of the boreal forest, and because the Native Athabaskans of the region have traditionally cremated their dead.
