There has been alot of heavy weather hitting western Alaska this summer. Here are photos from recent storm surge in Kotzebue.

Local power supplies were cut off, apartment buildings were flooded, cars were seen being washed away and a river overflowed, leading to one civilian death and several injuries.

The European Green Crab are a threat to ecosystems and commercial fisheries. They uproot eelgrass beds in search of food, which serve as habitat for herring and salmon.

In a report this week, a team of Canadian and U.S. scientists warned that hungry polar bears are increasingly turning to garbage dumps to fill their stomachs as their icy habitat disappears due to climate change.

The booming Bristol Bay salmon run has broken the record set just last year, while on the Yukon River, Chinook are too scarce to harvest.

Many boats had to be secured & moved this morning. Hoping winds & rain slow down, but in the forecast.

An extreme winter rainstorm in New Zealand triggered one of the largest avalanche cycles observed in decades, raising questions about the risk of more hazardous events under climate change.

More evidence of great white sharks this summer leads biologists to expect the species will become a more common sight here.

Sherol Mershon runs the Silver Fin Bed and Breakfast, on the shore of Lake Aleknagik. She’s hung fishing nets for 45 years and has seen her fair share of wildlife. So when her guests told her they saw whales in the lake, she had her doubts.

The ubiquitous midge is almost completely absent from Mývatn, the pointedly named ‘Midge Lake,’ this year. Árni says this happens every seven to nine years—it’s now been about eight since the last time the midge population collapsed. As a result, the bird population will be much smaller for the next two to three years.

Harju said that due to its long tusks, she guessed that it was an older walrus, adding that the animal was calm during the hour that she watched it lay on the beach.

Interesting cysts covering a young choke cherry tree.

Nunavut is being hit with lightning from top to bottom because a “pretty significant heat wave” created the right conditions for a phenomenon that’s ordinarily uncommon in the North, a meteorologist with Environment and Climate Change Canada says. Since Saturday, there have been reports of lightning strikes as far north as 79 degrees latitude.

Scientists and officials are advising hikers to be careful around the ice cave.

Landslide at 3 mile PSN happened outside the typical time of year for slides.

Last summer’s unusually warm weather fueled an explosion in the western blackheaded budworm, leaving masses of browning trees in many areas of Southeast. The worm, which is the larval stage of the budworm moth, is known to feed on the new growth of trees, leaving them with a brownish-red appearance.

Drained lake basins make up more than half of the Arctic coastal plain, but the complete drainage of a lake is rarely witnessed by people.

There were 4,500 lightning strikes in Alaska Tuesday — the latest in a run of days with thousands of ground strikes. There were also another 13 new, primarily lightning sparked wildfires in the state Tuesday, mostly in the Interior. The lightning storms have coincided with very dry conditions.

The rate of dead seal strandings in Maine is about three times the normal rate for the summer and is close to 60. Most of the seals that have been stranded this summer have been found dead, NOAA said. The dead seals have included gray seals and harbor seals.

On July 1, approximately 1,400 people experienced an outage in Dawson City caused by lightning. The community was partially restored after eight minutes, and fully restored after an hour. Five power outages occurred in Dawson City, Mayo and Whitehorse over the Canada Day weekend.