Background Articles

North Slope experts think Indigenous experts should take the lead on wildlife management. When it comes to belugas, caribou and ice seals, managing agencies and researchers are often in charge of setting hunting regulations and analyzing the animals.

The forces of climate change that are reducing ice cover and opening up the Arctic to more activity are making Alaska more important in regards to Homeland Security. For the Department, which has a combination of public safety, emergency response and law-enforcement functions, climate change is creating new challenges for which old responses are no longer adequate.

Electric heat pumps help homeowners swap fossil fuel for renewable energy. To spread heat pumps across the region, Allen Marine is collecting small donations from thousands of visitors that pass through Juneau, Sitka and Ketchikan on their whale watching and glacier tours each year.

Anchorage is cool and wet this summer as the rest of the world bakes in the sun and heat.

Clean, fresh air can be part of the draw for tourists to Canada's North — but they won't find it this week in Yellowknife due to wildfire smoke.

Extreme heat around the nation is affecting some flights departing from airports including Salt Lake City, Las Vegas and Phoenix, which have had triple-digit temperatures this week.

A Kodiak woman died in a hit-and-run collision during Saturday’s tsunami warning and evacuation,

An entomologist who works with the N.W.T. government said mosquito populations throughout the territory are lower than average. That’s because most types of mosquitoes "love water," and conditions in parts of the territory have been hot and dry instead. 

Wildfire smoke has been blasting much of the N.W.T. lately, with air quality advisories in nearly every community Tuesday morning. Meanwhile, much of the territory is also coping with record-breaking heat.

Graphite One is developing a plan for an open-pit graphite mine and is still in its exploration phase.

The damage wrought to the park’s road by melting permafrost is creating a new reality affecting visitors, park staff, local businesses and potentially wildlife.

No one knows how many birds are infected with avian influenza along the coast of Finnmark. In Vadsø, seagulls sit next to dozens of dead birds.

A low-pressure front that’s stuck over the southern part of the Bering Sea has formed clouds, which the jet stream carries east into southern Alaska.

People in Southeast Alaska are starting to see smoke from Canada's record-breaking wildfire season — and there’s more to come. The air quality levels are still fair: hovering around 17, on a scale that goes up to 300.

Shishaldin is one of the most active volcanoes in the Aleutians — it’s had nearly 30 eruptions since 1824.

For countless US veterans, the Army’s mismanagement and careless disposal of hazardous substances since the early years of the Cold War have been an enduring source of debilitating and fatal consequences. Notorious instances such as the pervasive contamination at Camp Lejeune, where toxins leached into groundwater for over 30 years.

Adventures go wrong whether through failures of gear or navigation, not to mention the unpredictable weather and large, wild animals. Adventurers can make thinking errors that, in some cases, make an uncomfortable situation much worse.

The current outbreaks of avian influenza (also called “bird flu”) have caused devastation in animal populations, including poultry, wild birds, and some mammals, and harmed farmers’ livelihoods and the food trade. Although largely affecting animals, these outbreaks pose ongoing risks to humans.

An invasive species of mollusks, typically found in Southeast Alaska and established in Girdwood in 2015, have been reported in the Anchorage Bowl this year. “The European black slug is not necessarily new to Alaska,” Slowik said. “It was introduced into Cordova about the 1980s and it really stayed there for a long time.”

People spread Covid-19 to wild white-tailed deer more than 100 times in late 2021 and early 2022. The infection circulated widely in the deer population in the United States, and in at least three instances, researchers suspect the virus was passed between deer where it picked up unique genetic changes and then re-infected humans.