By Joanne Howl15 August 2012 From Dr. Jon Ranson: […] But the common face of the forest can be summed in one word: change. Whether viewed from helicopter, boat, or on foot, huge areas of forest show the effects of fires. Some fires are recent, but most burned a couple of decades in the past. […]
By Juliet Eilperin, The Washington Post 5 August 2012 POINT HOPE, Alaska – Fermented whale’s tail doesn’t taste the same when the ice cellars flood. Whaling crews in this Arctic coast village store six feet of tail — skin, blubber and bone — underground from spring until fall. The tail freezes slowly while fermenting and […]
By Alison Singer; Edited by Antonia Sohns26 July 2012 Rezaul Karim Chowdhury is from Kutubdia, a Bangladeshi island in the Bay of Bengal. When Chowdhury was younger, the palm-dotted tropical island spanned 65 square kilometers, but rising sea levels and erosion have since shrunk it by more than half, to only 25 square kilometers. With […]
By CORNELIA DEAN23 July 2012 WHITEHORSE, Yukon Territory – […] Today, as the road now known as the Alaska Highway celebrates its 70th birthday, cars and trucks flash along what Wally Hidinger calls “a very good standard two-lane highway” from Dawson Creek, British Columbia, to Fairbanks, Alaska. “Our mantra is bare, dry pavement 365 days […]
ANCHORAGE, Alaska, 12 July 2012 (AP) – Even by Alaska standards, the rock slide in Glacier Bay National Park was a huge event. It was a monumental geophysical event that was almost overlooked until a pilot happened to fly over where the cliff collapsed and snapped some photographs nearly a month later. When the cliff […]
By Lorraine Jessepe 21 June 2012 LINCOLN, Nebraska – Native peoples are no stranger to forced relocation. It is a bitter chapter in the history of North American tribal peoples. Now, the 21st century version of Native relocation has emerged in Alaska, this time, as a consequence of man-made climate change. Climate-induced relocation is cited […]
By Ray Smith29 June 2012 GUTTANNEN (IPS) – Melting glaciers are the most visible effect of global warming in the Swiss Alps. Meanwhile, permafrost is invisible and melting too, often causing rockfall and massive debris flows, ultimately threatening mountain villages. Guttannen, home to 310 residents, is a tiny village in the Bernese Alps, the last […]
By Ben Cubby, Environment Editor18 June 2012 In a surprise finding, researchers have shown that as trees start to grow closer to the North Pole, replacing once-barren tundra, they release more greenhouse gases than they absorb. The study has global implications for measuring the speed of global warming because it had previously been thought that […]
By ANDREW C. REVKIN3 June 2012 Even as insect infestations and other factors accompanying warming have led to the “browning” of some stretches of boreal forest between temperate regions and the Arctic tundra, the tundra appears to be greening in a big way, various studies have shown. The newest such work, focused on scrubby windswept […]
By Bob Berwyn, Summit Voice22 May 2012 SUMMIT COUNTY – Widespread mercury pollution from wind-carried smokestack emissions has widely been recognized as a huge environmental problem, with concentrations of the toxic heavy metal building up in the food chain around the world. The pollutant has been especially prevalent in the Arctic, and now researchers think […]
