Colorado, Washington, Alaska and Oregon all experienced big increases in both deposits and lending shortly after legalizing marijuana for recreational use.
Destroyed buildings in San Francisco, Calif., after the 1906 earthquake.
(H.D. Chadwick/Wikimedia Commons)
Today’s building codes were implemented as a result of devastating natural disasters that resulted in the loss of human lives and billions of dollars. But they aren’t retroactively applied.
The Denali Highway as it crosses the Susitna River.
Joe Sohm/Visions of America/Universal Images Group via Getty Images
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.
View of Hobart Bay off Stephens Passage in Tongass National Forest, southeastern Alaska.
Wolfgang Kaehler/LightRocket via Getty Images
Scientists are urging the Biden administration to protect mature US forests as a climate change strategy, starting with the Tongass National Forest in Alaska.
A helicopter drops water on a forest fire in Alaska.
Michael Risinger/U.S. Army National Guard
An ecologist describes her field research and work on the impact of human activity on birds and their pathogens, which has taken her from Alaska to the Gulf of Guinea.
Permafrost is thawing across the Arctic, releasing microbes and organic materials that have been trapped in the frozen ground for thousands of years.
NOAA via Wikimedia Commons
New research shows that permafrost contains huge amounts of particles that make it easier for cloud moisture to freeze. Thawing permafrost is releasing these ice-nucleating particles.
A surface coal mine in Gillette, Wyoming, photographed in 2008.
Greg Goebel/Flickr
The pandemic recession has reduced US energy demand, roiling budgets in states that are major fossil fuel producers. But politics and culture can impede efforts to look beyond oil, gas and coal.
Caribou from the Porcupine Caribou Herd migrate onto the coastal plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in northeast Alaska.
USFWS via AP
The Trump administration is opening the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil and gas leasing – a step that’s as much about politics as it is about energy.
As climate change warms northern rivers and changes precipitation patterns, some types of cold-loving fish are failing.
This Arctic heat wave has been unusually long-lived. The darkest reds on this map of the Arctic are areas that were more than 14 degrees Fahrenheit warmer in the spring of 2020 compared to the recent 15-year average.
Joshua Stevens/NASA Earth Observatory
Alaska has been mostly spared from the virus, but the outbreak’s impact on its economy could still be catastrophic because of its reliance on seasonal tourism.
The January 2019 collapse of a dam in Brumadinho, Brazil, sent mining tailings and mud over the landscape for miles, destroying this bridge and killing 300 people.
Andre Penner/AP
Dams built to hold enormous quantities of toxic mining waste have a long history of spills. Decisions in the Pacific Northwest threaten three free-flowing rivers there.
New York’s offer of incentives to Amazon to open a headquarters in the state faced significant opposition.
AP Photo/Karen Matthews
In 1867, the US bought Alaska from Tsar Alexander II for a tidy sum of $7.2 million. Trump probably wouldn’t be able to get that kind of bargain for Greenland.
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 view of University of Alaska Fairbanks.
Gary Whitton/Shutterstock.com
How did Alaska, one of the richest states in the Union, end up with budget cuts that lawmakers on both sides say could wreck the state’s future? One answer’s found in three letters: PFD.