Published May 9, 2023

University of Alaska Fairbanks Kuskokwim Campus (KuC) is pleased to announce its Student of the Year Awards. The full-time Student of the Year Award will be presented to Felicia Canaar Daniel, born and raised in Bethel, daughter of Clarence and Julia Daniel. She earned her high school diploma at BRHS in 2021.

A sophomore, Felicia is working on her Bachelor of Arts degree in elementary education. After graduation Felicia hopes to find a job teaching young students, perhaps even going back to Tuntutuliak where her parents are originally from. 

KuC’s Part-time Student of the Year Award will be presented to Brianna Akagalria Norton of Nunapitchuk, daughter of Susan Wassillie. After earning her high school diploma from Galena Interior Learning Academy (GILA) in 2015, Brianna started her college career in Southeast Alaska but found KuC more to her liking. At KuC she earned her CNA certificate in 2016 and her Associate of Arts degree in 2021. Currently she is a senior in the Bachelor of Arts in Social Work program, hoping to complete her degree requirements next spring and begin a social work position working with children in the Yukon Kuskokwim region.

Published May 9, 2023 by Iris Samuels

One of Gov. Mike Dunleavy’s picks for the University of Alaska Board of Regents was rejected by the Legislature on Tuesday in a narrow 31-29 vote.

Bethany Marcum — the director of the conservative group Alaska Policy Forum, which has long advocated for cuts to public education funding — was the only one of Dunleavy’s appointees to cabinet positions, boards and commissions to be rejected by the Legislature in a joint session that included reviews of nearly 80 positions.

In the House, all 21 Republicans, along with Utqiagvik independent Josiah Patkotak, supported her confirmation. In the Senate, four Republicans joined all nine Democrats in opposing her confirmation to the Board of Regents, which oversees the university’s operations.

Published May 9, 2023 by Emily Mount

It was no joke on April 11, 2022, when a Sitka resident noticed a magnitude 2.1 earthquake measured by the local seismometer. They asked the Alaska Volcano Observatory if the quake was related to Edgecumbe. Was the long-dormant volcano reawakening?

 As hundreds of earthquakes rumbled around Edgecumbe, Ronni Grapenthin, associate professor of geodesy at University of Alaska Fairbanks, and his students Yitian Cheng and Mario Angarita, crunched data to understand what was happening. Four days later, they had an answer: Edgecumbe was steadily inflating as magma rose beneath the mountain.

The 2022 earthquake swarm presented a rare opportunity for Grapenthin to study a volcano reawakening from dormancy. Due to its many years of inactivity, however, Edgecumbe had no ground-based monitoring equipment. Grapenthin instead turned to remote sensing. Satellite radar observations taken since 2014 provide a detailed picture of the region’s surface. By comparing radar observations, Grapenthin’s team created interferograms, maps that show ground movement over time. “By using some physics and models, we can use the surface deformation to get at how much magma is moving to where under the volcano,” Grapenthin says.

Published May 9, 2023 by Tim Lydon

The Museum of the North in Fairbanks has received $500,000 to preserve the bus made famous in the book Into the Wild. The funding comes from the National Park Service and the Institute of Museum and Library Services and will help prepare the bus for public exhibit.

Angela Lin, senior collections manager at the museum, acknowledges that the bus can be polarizing in Alaska and says that the exhibit will address more than Into the Wild.

“We’re excited to tell a more complete story,” says Lin. 

Bus 142 is a 1946 International Harvester that served as a school bus, a Fairbanks transit bus, and eventually as remote housing for mine workers near the end of the Stampede Trail west of Healy. When its axle broke, the bus was abandoned on site. 

The bus gained global fame as the place where a young Christopher McCandless died in 1992. His story was recounted in Jon Krakauer’s 1996 book Into the Wild and a subsequent film directed by Sean Penn. It made the bus a destination for adventurers. 

But some underestimated the dangerous trek. Over the years, at least two people drowned, and others had to be rescued, leading to vandalism and calls for the bus’s removal. In 2020 the bus was airlifted out of the wild.

Published May 9, 2023 by Brian Venua, KMXT - Kodiak

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has declared this year’s climate to be an El Niño year based on conditions in the Pacific Ocean.

El Niño and La Niña are Spanish for “the boy” and “the girl,” respectively. But when it comes to climate, they’re part of an irregular cycle of sea surface temperatures in the Pacific Ocean near the equator.

This year, NOAA declared conditions are most in line with El Niño. That means Alaskans will likely see slightly higher temperatures and more storms, especially around the Gulf of Alaska. But high altitude winds like the jet stream are weaker in the summer, so the effects won’t be noticeable until later this year.

“It’s really as we move into the fall time and the storming increases again that we see the main effects of El Niño,” said University of Alaska Fairbanks climate specialist Rick Thoman.

He said just a few degrees difference near the equator changes where tropical storms form and can affect weather all around the ocean.

“Variations in ocean surface temperatures of one or two degrees 1,000 miles from Hawaii can wind up affecting our weather because those big, giant tropical thunderstorms can control how the jet stream flows and meanders at higher latitudes,” he said.

But Thoman was also quick to point out that while El Niño is the current prediction, weather can be fickle. El Niño and La Niña stack the deck towards certain conditions, but they’re just one factor forecasters take into account.

“There have been El Niño years when it has wound up colder than normal but we’re loading the dice to be warmer than normal for the upcoming winter,” he said.

Published May 9, 2023

Under legislation newly approved by the Alaska Senate, the University of Alaska will be required to warn students if a class requires expensive textbooks.

Senate Bill 13 passed the Senate on a 19-1 vote and now advances to the House for consideration.

Sen. Robert Myers, R-North Pole and the bill’s sponsor, punningly called it “a textbook example of a consumer protection bill.”

If enacted, the bill will require the University of Alaska to add labels to its course catalog saying whether a class’s textbooks and other material are “high cost,” “low cost” or “zero cost.”

Myers said the bill is modeled on similar legislation adopted by Maryland in 2020 and will help students shop for cheaper classes, if wanted.

The bill is supported by the student associations at the University of Alaska Anchorage and the University of Alaska Fairbanks, but the university system itself has taken no position on the bill.

Chad Hutchison, director of university relations for the university system, said the university is already planning to include something similar in a $20 million program to upgrade “student-facing IT.”

Published May 9, 2023

Two University of Alaska Southeast Juneau students tied for first place in the spring history writing contest. Each took a moment in local history and developed a fictional character who experienced that event.