Background Articles

Cook Inlet Keeper and the Center for Biological Diversity have sued the Federal Government over issuing permits to Hilcorp .

The director of Yukon Wildland Fire Management says firefighters had quite a summer, as conditions seem to be changing in the territory.

Waters off the coast of Maine are warming faster than 99 percent of the world's oceans. That's forcing whales northward in pursuit of prey, threatening some of their already dwindling populations.

Four people are confirmed sick in an outbreak of scombroid fish poisonings that are related to tuna now under recall by Mical Seafood Inc. “Elevated

According to a recently released recap from the Department of Fish & Game, crabbing in the Norton Sound this year was underwhelming in many ways. At the beginning of 2019, ADF&G set the reg…

Alaska’s warming winters and the broader habitat for ticks in the Lower 48 and Canada may provide a channel for rarer types to get to Alaska and survive there.

Drastic measures are needed to restore wild reindeer populations in all of Taymyr, northern Evenkia and western Yakutia. Poaching, climate change and excessive hunting caused colossal population drop.

Under extreme heat stress, corals expel their symbiotic algae and colour (that is, ‘bleaching’), which often leads to widespread mortality. Predicting the large-scale environmental conditions that reinforce or mitigate coral bleaching remains unresolved and limits strategic conservation actions1,2. Here we assessed coral bleaching at 226 sites and 26 environmental variables that represent different mechanisms of stress responses from East Africa to Fiji through a coordinated effort to evaluate the coral response to the 2014–2016 El Niño/Southern Oscillation thermal anomaly. We applied common time-series methods to study the temporal patterning of acute thermal stress and evaluated the effectiveness of conventional and new sea surface temperature metrics and mechanisms in predicting bleaching severity. The best models indicated the importance of peak hot temperatures, the duration of cool temperatures and temperature bimodality, which explained ~50% of the variance, compared to the common degree-heating week temperature index that explained only 9%. Our findings suggest that the threshold concept as a mechanism to explain bleaching alone was not as powerful as the multidimensional interactions of stresses, which include the duration and temporal patterning of hot and cold temperature extremes relative to average local conditions.

"What was unusual was the sheer number of them," Kuletz said. "Including the Bristol Bay area and the Pribilofs, it's up around 6,000 birds down on the beach. That's probably a small fraction of the number affected. This year stands out because of the huge shearwater die-off."

An emergency project to pump water from Unnamed Lake started in mid-August, and has been successful. The city's reservoir at Lake Geraldine is projected to be filled ten days ahead of schedule.

The number of moon jellyfish in Alaska waters has increased. Warm ocean temperatures and plentiful food in the form of zooplankton have contributed to the increased sightings

The Destination Charger was donated by Tesla Corporation and installed by Mark Haller and his crew from Midnight Sun Solar, along with Tyson Belle from Diamond Ridge Electric.

Ash, elm and rowan among trees threatened by pests and pollution, says biodiversity report

For the first time in more than 30 years, the Navy staged a joint training exercise on the far-western Aleutian island. Some are hoping it portends a permanent future in the region.

NOAA scientists and partners have released a Climate Vulnerability Assessment for groundfish, crabs, and salmon in the Eastern Bering Sea. They looked at the potential impacts of changing climate, ocean temperatures, and other environmental conditions on 36 groundfish, crab and salmon stocks. Of the

Teenage climate change activist Greta Thunberg on Monday opened the United Nations Climate Action Summit with an angry condemnation of world leaders for failing to take strong measures to combat climate change. "How dare you," she said.

The quota for the Bering Sea and Aleutian Islands crab fisheries will be set by Alaska Department of Fish and Game in mid-October

For more than a century farmers in California's Central Valley have been pumping water out of the ground — so much so that the land is slowly sinking, a process known as subsidence. In fewer than 100 years, it's dropped 8½ metres.

It already has caused coral bleaching in Hawaii and may be tied to strandings of marine mammals along the California coast.

Biologists say early retreating sea ice is potentially causing vegetation productivity changes on the tundra across Alaska and the Arctic. Uma Bot, a climate variability expert with the University of Alaska–Fairbanks, says the land warms up more quickly when sea ice recedes earlier than usual. “‘Cause the tundra is temperature limited and if it has more …