Temperatures in the area were unseasonably high last week, reaching into the mid-40s, according to the National Weather Service. Then temperatures dropped below freezing Sunday and into Monday morning. "There's a lot of water flowing underground in this area," McCarthy said. The freeze-thaw "caused some instability and that made it slide."
Alaska Division of Forestry spokesman Norm McDonald said the 2-acre fire's exact cause has not been determined but is suspected to be similar to that of four smaller Mat-Su wildfires earlier Thursday. Those blazes were tracked to backfires from a white Chevrolet pickup truck.
In villages like Kongiganak, communities have stopped burying their dead because, as the permafrost melts, the oldest part of their cemetery is sinking.
"Yesterday we came over to do an assessment of the high-water flood storm," said Northwest Arctic Borough Deputy Director of Public Services Dickie Moto, who grew up in Deering. "They lost a lot of ground on the front and on the back side of town because of the high water and rough seas.
The celebrity glacier on the Kenai Peninsula, though relatively small and getting smaller, looms large in the public consciousness.
Because ice makes up a good portion of the underground foundation of northern Alaska, thawing has dropped the landscape as much as 3 feet in some places.
As of Tuesday, two new fires had started in the Galena Zone, bringing the total number of fires in the area to 35. To date this year, wildland fires have burned more than 44,000 acres in the region.
The 2007 fire was probably the first for that area in 6,500 years, according to scientific evidence examined later, Higuera said. But the wait for the next big burn won't be nearly as long, according to the evidence gathered in the study.
When 200 million metric tons of rock tumbled down a remote Southeast Alaska mountain in October, nobody was around to see it. But thanks to a beefed-up seismic network and a new system that can distinguish landslides from earthquakes, scientists knew it had happened.
Smoke from a handful of fires in northeast Alaska and across the border in Canada drifted south to Fairbanks on Tuesday and is expected to linger through Wednesday night.
The Air Force is trying to better understand the erosion bearing down on its valuable radar sites.
A September storm caused damage in Utqiagvik, and Gov. Bill Walker declared a disaster there last month.
Alaskas tundra landscapes carpet a good portion of the state, from the North Slope to the elbow of the Alaska Peninsula. Researchers say it's slowly sinking in places -- as much as a fifth of an inch each year.
As Alaska warms and permafrost thaws, the chemistry of the Yukon River's water is transforming chemically, new research from the U.S. Geological Survey shows.
A species of seaweed has been washing up on beaches across the Caribbean and South Florida.
The fire came at a time of heightened risk of wildfires in parts of Scotland due to dry weather and large areas of dead vegetation. Other incidents included fires on Ben Lomond in the Lomond and the Trossachs National Park, on Gruinard Island in Wester Ross and near Dornoch.
Nunavut is not prepared to deal with the impacts of climate change and doesn't have a plan to deal with them, according to the latest report by Canada's auditor general.
The Northway Mall in northeast Anchorage sits almost totally empty. That’s led to people dumping loads of trash, furniture, appliances and industrial waste all over the property.
In northern Alaska, an amphitheater of frozen ground thaws where a northern river cuts into it, exposing walls of ice. The feature, known by scientists as “yedoma,” is the largest of its kind yet found in Alaska. A great wall of ice holds a lot of treasures from the past, which science is eager to explore.
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