Diomede

A city building in Little Diomede, Alaska, slid off its foundation, threatening the structural integrity of adjacent buildings and critical services, with the community seeking immediate assistance.

A polar bear that killed a young mother and her baby last month in western Alaska was likely an older animal in poor physical condition.

Harmful algal blooms will become a more common feature of a warming Arctic. Last summer, a massive bloom was detected off the coast of Western Alaska, almost by chance, when scientists sailing through the Bering Strait and Chukchi Sea found worryingly high levels of Alexandrium catenella.

A UAF graduate student has found microplastics in the stomachs of spotted seals harvested in the Bering Strait region.

For isolated communities at the top of the world, keeping the planet’s largest land predators -- polar bears -- out of town is key to coexistence.

A Wales resident shot and killed the bear. With the loss of sea ice and the ocean staying open later in the year, polar bears have been spending more time on land, which increases the chance of human encounters.

After alerting the region to very high levels of harmful algal blooms west of Kotzebue and Gambell two weeks ago, scientist onboard the research vessel Norseman II have found even higher numbers of Alexandrium catenella algae cells near Wales, Diomede and Shishmaref.

John Ahkvaluk , 56, a polar bear guard revealed that this is not a good sign for the village. It’s the first time in several years that bears come at this time of the year. “It’s a warning that they got no food out there and they came looking for it here,” he said. After the incident, Luchie Manlangit, the school principal, and I invited John Ahkvaluk to talk to the kids and to share some protocols if polar bear will come around again.

March brought a series of storms across the Seward Peninsula, and in one Bering Strait community that meant a series of power outages. The storms are stronger than residents recall in the past.

Two more Russian LNG tankers made history earlier this month passing through the North Sea Route, which extends along the northern coast of Russian Asia, in late January, the latest commercial ship

Last week, a 908-foot Russian tanker carrying liquified natural gas passed south through the Russian side of the Bering Strait, with two more to follow. The ships are traversing the northern coast of Siberia, called the North Sea Route, in the middle of January with no icebreaker escort, an unprecedented event that may hint at the future of the region as climate change alters global commerce.

Cold temperatures and traffic congestion at the Panama Canal has resulted in a shortage of natural gas and exploding prices in parts of Asia. Now, Novatek aims to send LNG from the Arctic to Japan during the middle of winter in an untested high-risk, high-reward strategy. 

A few years ago, people had to cover up parts of the burial site that were becoming exposed.

Wales lost shorefast ice early in the season. Ice along the shore has been crushed and broken. This is a very unusual event for Wales as many of our hunters rely on great ice conditions for whale and other sea mammal catch for food.

The “thermal curtain” is another expression for “cold pool” that acts as a barrier to keep some species—pollock and Pacific cod, for example — from migrating across the eastern Bering Sea shelf and northward toward the Bering Strait. For the first time in 37 years of surveying the Bering Sea, we could not find the cold water barrier.

Spiders possibly wolf spiders of family (Lycosidae) numbering some 75 to 100 were seen on top of snow along Boulder Creek road and lagoon.

Recent storms and warm seas melted a vast stretch of ice in the Bering Sea, leaving some islands surrounded by water when they should be locked in ice.

Last week, social media across Western Alaska lit up as residents posted photos and videos of open water where, normally, there's ice.

Three of the walruses had low to moderate levels of saxitoxin, while the fourth one had high levels.

Weather patterns have changed so much in the past several years.