Collaborative research by archaeologists, environmental scientists and tribal elders combines science and Indigenous knowledge to tell the story of centuries of life at a glacier’s edge.
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.
A brown bear in a Siberian boreal forest.
Logan Berner
How will Earth’s vast boreal forests look in a warmer world? Combining satellite-based research with fieldwork shows that the planet’s largest wilderness may be changing in unexpected ways.
Glacial lakes are common in the Himalayas, as this satellite view shows. Some are dammed by glaciers, other by moraines.
NASA
Alaska has at least 120 glacier-dammed lakes, and almost all have drained at least once since 1985, a new study shows. Small ones have been producing larger floods in recent years.
Kivalina sits on a narrow barrier island on the Chukchi Sea.
Joe Raedle/Getty Images
In the years since the Supreme Court rejected Kivalina’s appeal on May 20, 2013, the community’s search and rescue team has faced increasing climate disasters: ‘We just can’t adapt this fast.’
Several oil projects are active in the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska.
Bob Wick/Bureau of Land Management
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
Fires today are hotter and more destructive, thanks in part to a warming climate.
Permafrost and ice wedges have built up over millennia in the Arctic. When they thaw, they destabilize the surrounding landscape.
Michael Robinson Chavez/The Washington Post via Getty Images
Mark J. Lara, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Ground is collapsing and massive lakes are draining in a matter of days. Thawing permafrost is having profound effects on the region and its infrastructure.
Transplanting lettuce seedlings from greenhouses to fields in mid-May at VanderWeele Farm in Palmer, Alaska.
Tracy Robillard, NRCS Alaska/Flickr
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.
A bald eagle on Baranof Island in Alaska’s Tongass National Forest.
Wolfgang Kaehler/LightRocket via Getty Images
The Tongass National Forest in Alaska, a focus of political battles over old-growth logging and road-building in forests for decades, has received new protection from the Biden administration.
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.