Published Jun 23, 2024

Of course youth hockey players look up to Jamie Oleksiak. The Seattle Kraken defenseman is 6-foot-7 without skates. Almost everybody looks up to Jamie Oleksiak.

But these 12-and-under kids probably never thought they'd be receiving in-person instruction from a real-life NHL player. They play, and live, in Anchorage, Alaska.

This is the third straight year the Kraken have hosted community events in partnership with the Bristol Bay Native Corporation.

The team put its money where its mouth was, helping the University of Alaska-Anchorage revive its dormant Division I hockey program. "The Kraken was among the nearly 1,200 donors who helped Save the Seawolves campaign. The expansion franchise donated about $150,000 to the campaign."

Early in their expansion season, the Kraken hosted "Alaska Hockey Appreciation Night" at Climate Pledge Arena.

The Daily News called it, "Seattle Kraken’s aggressive game plan to wrap their tentacles around Alaska, and pay attention to the small-market state in a way that few, if any, major league teams have before."

Published Jun 23, 2024 by Alaska Native News

The University of Alaska Fairbanks College of Indigenous Studies is seeking an artist to design a logo for the college. 

Artists interested in working with the college on the design project should submit portfolios and resumes using the online submission form. The deadline for applications is July 8, 2024, at 11:59 p.m. The projected date for completion of the logo is Aug. 30, 2024. 

Visit the College of Indigenous Studies website for more information about the college and its campuses, departments and programs. Additional parameters for the logo project are available on the submission form.

Published Jun 23, 2024 by Staff report

Carl Bishop has been appointed dean of the University of Alaska Fairbanks Community and Technical College.

Bishop succeeds Bryan Uher, who has served as interim dean since the retirement of Michele Stalder last July. Bishop will assume the role on June 24.

With nearly 30 years of experience in higher education, Bishop most recently served as a vice president at South Piedmont Community College in North Carolina. During his tenure, enrollment increased and achievement gaps among student populations narrowed. His initiatives focused on enhancing learner access, offering flexible learning options, boosting retention, expanding apprenticeships and creating accelerated educational pathways.

Published Jun 22, 2024 by Adrian Peterson Adrian Peterson

For those that don’t have a boat of their own, they’re still welcome, as some equipment is provided. “We partner with UAF Outdoor Adventures and they are kind enough to loan us about six to eight canoes which they bring on location to the site and you just sign up with them and you can participate for free in one of their boats,” Burchfield said. While some life preservers are provided, racers are expected to bring their own safety equipment and wearing a life preserver is a must to participate.

Published Jun 22, 2024 by Ned Rozell

What’s going on with numbers of Alaska insects?

Two scientists recently completed a study on the abundance and variety of insects in the spruce forests of Alaska. If the study is duplicated in the future, researchers will be able to see whether Alaska is changing and how it compares to what is happening elsewhere on the planet.

“There are lots of disturbing reports coming from a lot of places,” said Derek Sikes, curator of the Insect Collection at the University of Alaska Museum of the North in Fairbanks.

Sikes is co-author of a new study of insects sampled in three areas of Alaska’s boreal forest. Blanketing land masses of the north from Alaska to the easternmost provinces in Canada, the boreal forest also covers parts of Scandinavia, Russia and Asia.

Sikes teamed up with Julie Hagelin of the Alaska Department of Fish and Game in Fairbanks on the study.

Sikes and students at the UA Museum of the North identified those insects and the timing with which they were available to birds. Overall, they found a strong midsummer pulse of insect biomass driven in part by temperature (warmer meant more insects). They also found 49 new state beetle records and 10 beetles not only new to Alaska but “new to the universe.”

Those discoveries add to a long list of species Sikes has documented in Alaska. He has been everywhere from the Aleutians to the North Slope to Southeast in his 18 years as the lead entomologist at the museum. Working with Hagelin allowed him a detailed look into the boreal forest in which Fairbanks sits.

Published Jun 21, 2024

The researchers had been sampling for a little more than an hour, collecting snow from the surface and drilling ice cores with noisy machines, when we saw a line of black dots a few miles away, behind the ship. The shapes were moving quickly toward us.

Ken Block: There are a lot of penguins over there! Moutinho (tape): Yes, there’s, like, 100 penguins coming this way!

Moutinho: Soon enough we realized it was a group of Adélies. They moved across the ice in a huge line—some walking clumsily, others sliding on their belly.

Moutinho: The gang of penguins squawked, honked, waved their wings and inspected every hole on the ice. The animals had a special admiration for the scientists’ shovels. Some looked like they wanted to mate with the tools. One of them jumped into a plastic slide that the scientists use to carry equipment and just wouldn’t leave it.

[CLIP: Penguin noises]

Whitmore: We’re not supposed to interfere with the penguins, right? So if they come, we kind of have to just let them be there.

Moutinho: That’s Laura Whitmore, a chemical oceanographer at the University of Alaska Fairbanks and leader of ice operations on the Palmer. Because of that her colleagues nicknamed her “the Ice Queen.”

Whitmore: While we’re doing the work, I would rather them not be right in our sampling area. We’re trying to get clean samples, and penguins are pretty dirty [laughs].

Moutinho: While we had never seen so many penguins on the ice before, this was not our only encounter with them. These birds greeted us practically every time we stopped to collect samples during our journey in West Antarctica.

This was Laura’s first trip to Antarctica. She usually studies ice in the Arctic, where there are no penguins, and she was surprised by how curious these birds are.

Whitmore: The first floe we were on, they came right up to us, and I just think their behavior—coming close to people—was the first surprising thing. And then they did it again. It’s like, “This is just their behavior. They’re going to come up to us.”