Here at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, as wisdom passes from one generation to the next, revolutionary ideas are thriving and a new academic culture is taking shape.
With undergraduates making up 89 percent of the total student body, UAF is a hotbed of diversity and fresh thinking. Whether you’re returning to school to start a new phase of your life or coming in as a recent high school graduate, you’ll quickly make new friends with a similar drive to achieve. And, because our backyard is the vast environmental laboratory of Alaska, UAF attracts exceptional individuals — academic superstars and adventure-seekers alike.
With seven campuses across the state, we are home to more than 11,000 students from all over the world — each in pursuit of something extraordinary.
Giovanna Stevens grew up harvesting salmon at her family’s fish camp on Alaska’s Yukon River. Climate change is interrupting hunting and fishing traditions in many areas.
AP Photo/Nathan Howard
The early heat melted snow and warmed rivers, heating up the land and downstream ocean areas. The effects harmed salmon fisheries, melted sea ice and fueled widespread fires.
Rainier winters make life more difficult for Arctic wildlife and the humans who rely on them.
Scott Wallace/Getty Image
Most of the flooded communities are Indigenous and rely on subsistence hunting that residents would normally be doing right now. Recovering from the damage will make that harder.
A large tundra fire burned near St. Mary’s, Alaska, on June 13, 2022.
BLM Alaska Fire Service/Incident Management Team/John Kern
Sea ice is thinning at an alarming rate. Snow is shifting to rain. And humans worldwide are increasingly feeling the impact of what happens in the seemingly distant Arctic.
Aging U.S. infrastructure: Rust on the underside of the Norwalk River Railroad Bridge, built in 1896 in Norwalk, Conn., and scheduled for replacement starting in 2022.
AP Photo/Susan Haigh
Alaska is warming faster than any other U.S. state, and that’s causing problems, a team of bridge engineers and social scientists explains. The infrastructure bill in Congress would offer some help.
Smoke from wildfires in Siberia drifts east toward Canada and the U.S. on July 30, 2019.
NASA
A researcher based in Fairbanks, Alaska, links 2019’s record-breaking wildfires in far northern regions of the world to climate change, and describes what it’s like as zones near her city burn.
A pod of narwhals (Monodon monoceros) in central Baffin Bay. Narwhals are the most vulnerable animals to increased ship traffic in the Arctic Ocean.
Kristin Laidre/University of Washington
Climate change is shrinking Arctic sea ice and opening the region to ship traffic. Whales, seals and other marine mammals could be at risk unless nations adopt rules to protect them.
2016’s warm winter meant not enough snow for the start of the Iditarod sled dog race in Anchorage, so it was brought by train from 360 miles north.
AP/Rachel D'Oro
For everyone from traditional hunters to the military, the National Park Service to the oil industry, climate change is the new reality in Alaska. Government, residents and businesses are all trying to adapt.
Giant sloths: killed by rainy weather?
Kamraman/Wikimedia Commons
A burst of wet weather could have helped to kill off mammoths and other large herbivores, by transforming much of the world’s grasslands into bogs and forests and depriving megafauna of food.