Background Articles

With ice declining, bowhead whales of the Pacific Arctic choose to stay longer in the waters up north. A change in migration patterns could affect the bowheads' health and safety, as well as the hunters' access to the subsistence resource.

A new variant of bird flu has recently infected both sea lions and mink. Health authorities around the world are now monitoring that it does not begin to infect humans.

Russian and American scientists have been cut off from collaborating for a year, and Arctic research is suffering.

A new report predicts there will be almost no narwhal left in an area off the northeastern coast of Baffin Island this summer and says shipping traffic from the nearby Mary River iron ore mine is to blame. The mine's operator says it leaves out key information.

The pack killed all the black-tailed deer on the island and another established pack back on the mainland was preventing their return. Scientists assumed they would die off from starvation.

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.

Despite the negativity toward using and selling fur, Indigenous people say fur can be a sustainable, respectful and even luxurious material for clothing, accessories and art.

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

Backyard Buoys project will give residents real time data such as wave height to whaling crews and communities throughout the North Slope. A system of buoys will be displaced across the slope this summer.

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.

There are new signs that killer whales, which are swimming farther north and staying for longer periods of the year in Arctic waters, are increasingly preying on Alaska’s bowhead whales. A newly published study found that 2019, an especially warm year in the region, also seems to have been an especially dangerous year for bowheads.

Researchers have detected striking changes in narwhal migration times driven by climate changes in the North. "Our long-term dataset identified that passage boundary crossing dates were associated with changing sea ice dynamics as a result of climate change," the researchers said in their paper p

Southeast Alaska’s wolves tend to favor deer and moose at mealtime, but in a pinch they won’t say no to black bear – or even sea otter.