Background Articles

By Saturday, the East Fork fire had grown to just over 108,000 acres but triggered no mandatory evacuations.

Ricky Wright points to the bank of a creek to show one way his hometown has been affected by climate change. Many banks have eroded or collapsed, and now some favorite fishing spots that were once on solid ground are reachable only by boat.

Climate change is causing infrastructure collapse and increased polar bear encounters on Little Diomede Island, Alaska, as melting permafrost undermines buildings and ice loss affects wildlife behavior.

Scientists from the Russian Academy of Sciences hypothesize that as the melting of the permafrost becomes more prevalent, so will the incidence of lung cancer.

The East Fork Fire in Western Alaska is the state's largest at the moment, estimated at more than 150,000 acres Thursday, and it's burning in a region where, just a couple decades ago, large fires would not have been expected.

IThe Great Whale River landslide, which happened about eight kilometres upstream from the Cree and Inuit villages of Whapmagoostui and Kuujjuarapik, was too far south to be caused by melting permafrost, and too deep to be caused by variations in the climate, says a landslide expert.

Projections show rising sea levels could cause Canada’s beaches to retreat inland, in extreme cases by as much as half a kilometre. The best option may be to stand back and let it happen.

After hitching a ride with humans, the species has colonised entire areas – and may be making the soil too fertile

There were no bugs buzzing around the lights in the parking lot.

In Yakutia, just a few meters separate summer from winter. There are places here where you can always build a snowman or taste fresh snowflakes.

New research shows that amplified global warming in the Canadian High Arctic drove a profound shift in the structure of a river network carved into a permafrost landscape in only 60 years. Researchers combined air photographs from 1959 with field observations and state-of-the-art Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) data they collected in 2019 to understand how the Axel Heiberg Island landscape has evolved over a 60-year period

The need to diversify America's sources of graphite for electric vehicle batteries is driving the exploration of graphite mining projects in the United States, but concerns about the potential environmental impact and disruption to Indigenous communities remain.

Most of Alaska sits atop permafrost. But the ground is thawing, leading to unexpected and sometimes catastrophic outcomes — what scientists have called a “slow disaster.”

An amount of shoreline roughly the size of central Moscow now collapses into the sea every year.

Peatlands make up 3 percent of the earth’s landscape, yet absorb large amounts of carbon and harbor surprising biodiversity. Although peat bogs and fens are under increasing environmental threat, efforts to protect and restore these ecosystems are gathering momentum.

UAF graduate student Reyce Bogardus talks about sea ice, storms and coastal erosion at Nelson Lagoon, which is on the southernmost edge of the historical max...

Climate change and warmer conditions have altered snow-driven extremes and previous studies predict less and slower snowmelt in the northern United States and Canada. However, mixed-phase precipitation—shifting between snow and rain—is increasing, especially in higher elevations, making it more challenging to predict future snowmelt, a dominant driver of severe flooding. Researchers at the University of New Hampshire took a closer look at previous studies, and because geographical areas respond differently to climate change, they found future snowmelt incidences could vary greatly by the late 21st century. Snowmelt could decrease over the continental U.S. and southern Canada but increase in Alaska and northern Canada resulting in larger flooding vulnerabilities and possibly causing major societal and economic consequences including costly infrastructure failures.

According to a new study, thawing of permafrost due to climate change could expose the Arctic population to much greater concentrations of the invisible, lung cancer-causing gas Radon.

A small, furry rodent — the vole — is showing up throughout Utah as this year’s record amount of snow melts. Orchards, residential lawns, pastures, and golf course lawns are feeling the brunt of the vole’s activity. Voles are the world’s most prolific mammals.

By Ed Struzik. This article was originally published on Yale Environment 360. Canadian scientist Philip Marsh and I were flying along the coast of the Beaufort Sea, where the frozen tundra had recently opened up into a crater the size of a football stadium. Located along the shoreline of an unnamed lake, the so-called thaw...