By Andrea Thompson 2 May 2018 (Scientific American) – April should be prime walrus hunting season for the native villages that dot Alaska’s remote western coast. In years past the winter sea ice where the animals rest would still be abundant, providing prime targets for subsistence hunters. But this year sea-ice coverage as of late […]
By Oliver Milman 22 April 2018 Utqiaġvik, Alaska (The Guardian) – Last July, Nagruk Harcharek was savouring a bucolic visit to a cabin that sits on the lip of the Chipp river, deep in the Alaskan Arctic, when something caught his eye. Shimmering on a rack where he hangs his caught whitefish to dry was, […]
By Darryl Fears 4 January 2018 (The Washington Post) – The Trump administration unveiled a controversial proposal Thursday to permit drilling in most U.S. continental-shelf waters, including protected areas of the Arctic and the Atlantic, where oil and gas exploration is opposed by governors from New Jersey to Florida, nearly a dozen attorneys general, more […]
6 December 2017 (NSIDC) – November 2017 will be remembered not for total Arctic ice extent, which was the third lowest recorded over the period of satellite observations, but for the record low extent in the Chukchi Sea. This is a key area for Arctic Ocean access, and is an indicator of oceanographic influences on […]
By Robinson Meyer 2 December 2017 (The Atlantic) – When Bernadette Demientieff was in high school, she gave up her heritage. Demientieff is a member of the Gwich’in, an indigenous tribe of roughly 9,000 people that spans north-central Alaska and northern Canada. “The ways of living in this world that are being pushed on our […]
By John Hopewell 7 December 2017 (The Washington Post) – Imagine going into a movie theater to check out the latest science fiction flick and there is not a single flake of snow on the ground. A couple hours later, as the credits start to roll, you mosey outside and are stunned to find your […]
By Zahra Hirji and Jason Leopold 20 October 2017 (BuzzFeed News) – At least 27 accidents happened at BP’s oil and gas operations in Alaska this year, including five that risked the lives of dozens of workers, BuzzFeed News has learned. Now BP’s top officials are scrambling to “reset” the company’s safety culture before one […]
By Devin Henry 22 October 2017 (The Hill) – The Senate’s budget vote on Thursday was the opening salvo in what’s likely to be a bitter fight over drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR). President Trump, key officials in his administration and leading Republicans support drilling in ANWR, an expanse of 19 million […]
By Evan Halper 4 October 2017 (The Los Angeles Times) – Interior Department manager Joel Clement figured his new bosses in the Trump administration might disapprove of his climate-change-focused work protecting Alaskan villages from rising seas. But the reassignment slip Clement received in June stunned him. He was not only removed from his post as […]
By Alan Burdick 21 September 2017 (The New Yorker) – Every spring, in alpine regions around the world, one of Earth’s tiniest migrations takes place. The migrants are single-celled green algae; they are kin to seaweed, but instead of living in the sea they live in snow. (Snow weed, maybe?) They spend the winter deep […]
