Published Oct 18, 2023 by Editorial Team

WASHINGTON, D.C. – U.S. Senator Brian Schatz (D-HI), Chairman of the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs, and U.S. Senator Lisa Murkowski (R-AK), Vice Chairman of the Committee, announced more than $2.2 million in new fiscal year 2023 grant funding from the U.S. Department of Education to implement the Native American Language Resource Center Act, legislation led by the Senators and enacted earlier this year.

The new grants will support Native American language use, revitalization, and instruction to advance the goals of the Native American Languages Act of 1990, which recognized the inherent rights and freedoms of Native Americans to use their Indigenous languages. The full list of Native American Language Resource Center Act grant recipients includes:

• University of Hawaii in partnership with University of Alaska Southeast and Lac Courte Oreilles Ojibwe University for a National Center
• Little Priest Tribal College for a Regional Center (Central)
• University of Oregon for a Regional Center (Northwest)
• University of Arizona in partnership with Tohono O’odham Community College, San Carlos Apache College, and Diné College for a Regional Center (West)

Published Oct 18, 2023 by Condé Nast

Salmon are legendary for their commitment to procreation. You know the drill: They wander the ocean before returning to rivers where they hatched, fire themselves upstream to spawn, and then drop dead. It’s not such a rigid life cycle, though. In fact, it’s a system that’s allowed a species like the chum salmon to find new habitats: Some individuals actually seek out different rivers and spawn there. Now, scientists say, chum salmon are spawning in the Arctic, a sign of rapid climate change.

“We saw not only fish that were actively spawning, or had finished spawning and were still alive, but also carcasses—fish that had been spawning and already died,” says Peter Westley, an evolutionary ecologist at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks. “It's really consistent with that clear harbinger of climate change: this shift toward the poles.” The scientists don’t know yet, though, whether that spawning actually resulted in the successful development of young fish—just that it happened.

Instead of returning to spawn in their home rivers, the University of Alaska team thinks, at some point individual chum salmon strayed north. In warmer years, in fact, there are higher rates of straying.

Published Oct 18, 2023 by Katie Anastas

David Noon and Britteny Cioni-Haywood held strong leads for the two available school board seats from the first vote count. In the end, Noon got 5,739 votes and Cioni-Haywood got 5,377. 

The third school board candidate, Paige Sipniewski, was the only candidate to embrace culture war issues like restricting the rights of transgender students and banning certain books from school libraries. She got 3,061 votes. 

Noon, a history professor at the University of Alaska Southeast, said he’s heard from teachers and other staff about declining morale amid flat-funding from the state and new mandates from the Alaska Reads Act.

Published Oct 18, 2023

A longtime street photographer, Charles Mason knows this about Paris: “It’s made for walking,” he says. On a trip to the city last November, he and his wife averaged 10 miles a day for 8 days—stopping, of course, to refuel at Parisian restaurants, such as the one in his image “Sidewalk Cafe,” which he shot with a Leica Q2 digital camera while having breakfast not too far from the Eiffel Tower.

Mason has taught photography at the University of Alaska at Fairbanks for 35 years. “The teaching base is a good one to be able to work from, and my photography then informs my classroom work,” he notes. “It’s great symbiosis in life.

Published Oct 17, 2023

There are already several inches of snow on the ground in Fairbanks, but you won’t find any surrounding Vladimir Romanovsky’s house. Romanovsky, a permafrost expert and professor emeritus at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, keeps the ground shoveled. 

Permafrost is the frozen layer of ground on or just under the Earth’s surface found in polar regions. Romanovsky is part of a team of international scientists who are trying to understand how quickly it’s thawing. 

The team modeled different scenarios of warming to see the effects on permafrost and published their findings in August in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. In severe warming scenarios they found that more than 75% of Earth’s near-surface permafrost, 10-13 feet below ground, will be gone by the end of the century. Even in more moderate warming scenarios, more than half will disappear.