A post from the science website Earthsky revisits the "loneliest whale in the world," an unknown whale that the Navy has tracked since 1992 with submarine monitoring equipment -- identifiable by its song sung at a frequency of 52 Hertz that's not shared with any other known whale on earth.
The temperature along the Yukon River approached 35 degrees below zero and the wind was howling when 68-year-old Ignatius Waskey headed out from Mountain Village to search for firewood last week. There are no trees in the community of about 800 on the eastern edge of the broad, windswept Yukon Delta along Alaska's western coast, where residents still burn wood to heat their homes.
They hunt for what drifts down the mighty river and haul it home to the stuff the woodstove.
The permafrost has sunk so much in one Northwest Alaska village that bridges are shifting, outdoor stairways hang over the ground and sagging water pipes are prone to break and freeze.
Those are a few of the ways climate change is affecting life in the Inupiat village of Selawik, according to the Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium's Center for Climate and Health.
Did Alaska Gov. Sean Parnell channel his predecessor, Sarah Palin, Thursday? He did, after all, use a sports metaphor to break down complicated stuff: his effort to unite the state's big three oil companies around the idea of building a long-sought, multi-billion-dollar natural gas pipeline down the middle of Alaska.
The heads of three huge and powerful companies, who don't much like each other, met with the governor of Alaska and some select invitees Thursday to talk about how to put together the deal of the century for the 49th state. Afterward, nothing had officially changed as regards a long-discussed, long-stalled pipeline to move stranded natural gas from the North Slope to markets anywhere. And yet everything had changed.
Or maybe not. The significance of the parley was dependent, in large part, on who was reading the tea leaves.
The start of the Yukon Quest 1,000-mile International Sled Dog Race is a month away, and more than 30 teams have entered. The teams this year will leave Fairbanks on Feb. 4 and head for the finish line in Whitehorse, across the border in the Yukon Territory of Canada. With all those people and dogs gearing up to cross the border between Alaska and Canada, Alaska Dispatch takes a look by the numbers at what people and goods cross the border during the rest of the year.
The first person to swim the deadly Bering Strait has words of warning for an international relay team of ice swimmers hoping to stroke 86 miles from Russia to the United States in body-numbing temperatures this summer.
On Wednesday, the Anchorage Museum announced an exhibit that might seem more at home among the oddities of Ripley's Believe it or Not! instead of an art museum. "Body Worlds Vital," an exhibit that teaches about human anatomy by displaying real human bodies preserved through a special process called plastination, will make its way to Alaska in September 2012.
Update Jan 19 10:05 a.m., from Capt. Peter Garay, about three hours after the Renda completed transferring her fuel load to storage tanks on shore in Nome:
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