The Valdez Star - Serving Prince William Sound and Copper River Basin

Thousands of Alaska mosquitoes are now on sabbatical at the University of California, Davis. They are not pestering suntanned Californians. Researchers are analyzing their tiny corpses to see if the...

CHENA HOT SPRINGS — “This is your chance — maybe your only chance in a lifetime — to see vole poop in a tunnel,” said Mike Taras, an expert tracker and wildlife educator for the Alaska Depar...

Kenji Yoshikawa will soon sleep on brilliant, blue-white landscape that has never felt the imprint of his boots. Beginning on spring equinox, the permafrost scientist and a partner will attempt to...

BETHEL — Outside the Fly By Café, the ravens are flying backwards. At least they appear to be, as a powerful wind suspends them in time and space. A brewing ground blizzard in this Southwest...

Sometimes, after idling in the sky for hours as a greenish glow, the aurora catches fire, erupting toward the magnetic north pole in magnificent chaos that can last for three hours. “Substorms,”...

This just in: 2012 was the coldest year of the new century in Fairbanks, and the second coldest here in the last 40 years. Fairbanks isn’t the only chilly place in Alaska. Average temperatures at 19 of 20 long-term National Weather Service...

Around midnight on January 4, Kathleen Brandt felt an earthquake at her home in Sitka. As framed pictures trembled and then fell from the walls, she started counting. “I got to 22 seconds before...

CRAIG — In this cozy Southeast Alaska community that smells of red cedar chips used to power a boiler that heats both the school and the pool, seismologist Natalia Ruppert responded to an hour of...

As she scraped cold dirt from the remains of an extinct bison, Pam Groves wrinkled her nose at a rotten-egg smell wafting from gristle that still clung to the animal’s bones. She lifted her head to scan the horizon, wary of bears that might be...

Alaska was once the setting for an environmental shift so dramatic it forced people to evacuate the entire North Slope, according to Michael Kunz, an archaeologist with the Bureau of Land Management. About 10,000 years ago, a group of hunting people...

SAN FRANCISCO — Northern sea ice is at its lowest summer coverage since scientists have been able to see it from satellites. Greenland experienced its warmest summer in 170 years. Eight of 10...

From a lecture hall within a land of warm breezes and flowering December plants comes astory of a creature 2,600 miles north, where the sun will not rise for another 50 days. At the 2012 Fall Meeting of the American Geophysical Union, biologist Georg...

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...

Imagine planning a dream journey across a landscape you have seen for years, if only in your mind’s eye. You get to choose the means of transportation, the never-before-done route, and your travel...

As Alaska’s billion lakes become colder and harder, some of them will sport mysterious, spidery cracks extending from small holes in the ice. This phenomenon inspired a geophysicist to figure out what he calls “lake stars.” “I thought...

HALL ISLAND — On this windy, misty August day, there are perhaps one million birds clinging to the cliffs that buttress this Bering Sea island. These seabirds, crazy-eyed and with bodies both sleek and clumsy, need solid ground for just a few...

On the upper Chena River in the heart of a cold winter, a songbird appeared on a gravel bar next to gurgling water that somehow remained unfrozen in 20-below zero air. Then the bird jumped in, disappeared underwater, and popped up a few feet...

An Alaska wolf that disappeared about 12,000 years ago just made another appearance. No one will ever see this wolf, but scientists have found that it was different from Alaska’s wolves of today, and it was not like its Ice-Age contemporaries that...

A couple of summers ago, David Tomeo was exploring a creekbed in Denali National Park, preparing for a field seminar on the park’s dinosaurs he would help lead a few weeks later. With a trained eye...

This summer, the Girls on Ice program visited an Alaska glacier for the first time. It probably won’t be the last, said organizer Joanna Young. “We talked about how the girls would be inspired,...

“He’s the only person I know who sang at his own funeral,” Jim Brader said after attending the Fairbanks celebration of life for his friend Jack Townshend, the geophysicist who died Aug. 13, 2012 at the age of 85. As his recorded version of...

ST. MATTHEW ISLAND - “Oh look, another tooth,” says Dennis Griffin, dressed in raingear and caked with wet soil. Griffin, the state archaeologist with Oregon’s State Historic Preservation...

ST. MATTHEW ISLAND —I’m stretched out on a mattress of tundra plants that are growing more than 200 miles from the nearest Alaska village. I’m here on my own private ridge top while eight other...

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...

“Rectal Temperature of the Working Sled Dog.” “Cleaning and Sterilization of Bunny Boots.” “Comparative Sweat Rates of Eskimos and Caucasians Under Controlled Conditions.” These are some of the studies completed by scientists who worked...