Published Oct 19, 2023 by Carter DeJong

The University of Alaska Museum of the North will host Ask an Archaeologist, a multi-day event where the community can learn about ongoing projects and ask questions related to archaeology.

The event will take place daily from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday in the lobby of the museum, located at 1962 Yukon Drive on UAF’s campus. The event is free to the public.

Each day will feature different research projects and allow the public to view artifacts not usually on display at the museum, Archaeology Curator Josh Reuther said. Only around 1% to 5% of artifacts housed at the museum are regularly featured in exhibits.

“It’s been one of those events where we’ve really liked it, the community has kinda picked up on it,” Reuther said. “People bring in things to share and ask questions.”

Published Oct 19, 2023 by Bloomberg News

Dmitry Nicolsky, a geophysicist at the University of Alaska at Fairbanks who researches thawing Arctic permafrost, managed to stay in touch with some of his Russia-based colleagues as the war started to unfold. But over time that contact stopped, and with it key information-sharing. 

These projects represent a small fraction of the Arctic climate research that’s been derailed by the war in Ukraine. Studying the fast-warming top of the planet is crucial to efforts to mitigate global warming and understand its dynamics at lower latitudes. Arctic climate scientists tend to be a close-knit community, as normal professional rivalries are flattened by the borderless, existential threat of climate change. 

But the war upended that status quo: Now geopolitics are a main determinant of whether scientific projects can move forward.

Finding ways to restart stalled science will be a recurring topic of conversation at a major Arctic conference in Iceland this week, where for the second year in a row, Russian scientists will not be present. 

Nicolsky’s research on permafrost has been supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF), one of the major American bodies that stopped funding new projects involving Russia under White House guidelines. The NSF also pulled out of most existing projects, unless they could be adjusted to focus on non-Russian parts of the region. (A European Commission decision had a similar impact on European funding.)

The project involved collecting temperature readings from more than 250 permafrost monitoring sites in Russia, Alaska and Canada, and mapping key changes. Arctic permafrost is estimated to hold 1,700 billion metric tons of frozen and thawing organic carbon, at least twice what’s already in the Earth’s atmosphere. As it thaws, that gas is released, accelerating warming, which in turn speeds up thawing in a dangerous cycle. 

Most of the planet’s permafrost lies within Russia and Nicolsky was relying on Russian colleagues to collect that data.

He’s spent hours poring over legal documents, trying to find a clear path to continue working together. While the NSF did not withdraw funding, Nicolsky’s collaborators in Russia are unsure whether it’s safe to accept it, or even to communicate with US-based scientists. 

Studying melting permafrost without Russian data is “like removing a couple of wheels from a car and trying to drive it home” 

Published Oct 19, 2023 by Josh Reed

It’s been more than 20 years since the inaugural Great Northwest Athletic Conference cross country regional championship was held in the Last Frontier. Now, the University of Alaska Anchorage will host the annual event this Saturday at Kincaid Park before the Seawolves cross country team heads to the NCAA West Regional for a bid to qualify for Division II nationals.

This rare occurrence was made possible by the resurgence of UAA’s cross country program after a few down years. Significant reductions in state funding, the global COVID-19 pandemic and the retirement of longtime coach Michael Friese all contributed to the drop in their success.

“This is the right year for us to be hosting this meet because this is, hands down, the best place the program has been in since 2019, and a lot has changed since then,” UAA cross country associate head coach Chas Davis said.

In cross country, hosting a meet doesn’t always give the home team the upper hand, but in this case, Davis believes “it probably will be a home-field advantage.”

“Typically, collegiate cross country courses are very flat and very almost not cross country,” he said. “They’re usually well-manicured, and the people in charge like them to be as flat and even as possible. Our course is not that, so I think a lot of people are going to be surprised at how challenging the course is and where we’ve been able to work out every other week throughout the season.”

Since they’re prepared to conquer the course and know what to expect, several runners are even more optimistic about their odds of success this weekend.

“We’ve been running workouts on it all year, and I think we’re all very ready to have the home course (advantage),” Nash said. “Hopefully, that’s a big difference maker.”

Published Oct 18, 2023

On Friday, Oct. 13, UAA's largest alumni tradition saw more than 300 UAA graduates and partners pack the Alaska Airlines Center auxiliary gym for the annual UAA Alumni Association Homecoming Luncheon to reconnect with their alma mater while raising donations to benefit UAA programs and scholarships. In just one hour, the gathered alumni raised over $10,000.

In collaboration with the Anchorage School District, this year's theme was partners in education, and featured stories of the importance of an Alaska education and the critical roles we all serve in providing educational pathways to our next generation of leaders. This year’s presenters were keynote speaker Cal Williams, Honorary Doctor of Humane Letters ’22, community activist and past president of the NAACP Alaska chapter; and guest speaker Brad Hillwig, M.B.A. General Management ’10, founder and CEO of Greatland Studios.

Published Oct 18, 2023 by DANELLE KELLY Daily News Staff Writer

Houghtaling preschool teacher Kathleen Varela led her students on a berry-picking adventure in the muskeg that edges the trail near Point Higgins Elementary School on Oct. 10.

University of Alaska Southeast Ketchikan Campus Professor Barbara Morgan guided the students and taught them about plant and berry identification.

Published Oct 18, 2023 by Jack Barnwell

When it comes to food security and efficiency in the circumpolar north, Alaska tends to lag behind some other places, such as Iceland, the Faroe Islands, and other Nordic regions.

Jodie Anderson, director of the University of Alaska Fairbanks’ Institute of Agriculture, Natural Resources and Extension, noticed some of that in her takeaways after attending a circumpolar agriculture conference in Tórshavn, Faroe Islands, in September.

Anderson shared some of her findings and assessments from the conference during a “lunch and learn” event Tuesday at UAF. The conference included members from Iceland, Faroe Islands, Greenland, Finland, Norway, Canada and other countries.

“We need an understanding of the importance of a strong food system with our government at the state and federal level,” Anderson said. “It requires some innovation and risk taking on the opportunities we might have that may have been tried before, fix what didn’t work and try it again.”

Some of the takeaways, she said, can be applied to improving Alaska’s food system through efforts from UAF and similar land-grant universities.

“We are in need of strengthening our food systems, and that goes beyond one unit at one university as it has to be a multi-faceted approach,” Anderson said. “We can’t just take agriculture researchers to solve a problem, we need economists to help us log the stats that are missing, energy specialists to help us with opportunities that are out there and social scientists.”

Anderson is part of the state’s food security and independence task force, which developed an initial report and goals to bolster the state’s food system. She noted, that while the initial report has laid out boundaries, more work is being done.

Published Oct 18, 2023

It’s difficult to quantify and rank the threats of climate change — how do you weigh the complete collapse of a Yukon salmon run against the forced relocation of village — yet whatever your priorities the impact of a changing climate on outdoor recreation is likely pretty far down the list. I recognize I’m in an extremely privileged place, both to be able to recreate in the beautiful and wild Lingít Aaní, and to be able to talk about the changes I’m seeing not to my livelihood or household, but to the things I do entirely for fun.

While rain has shaped this landscape for thousands of years, a recent report from my colleagues at the Alaska Coastal Rainforest Center and the University of Alaska Southeast suggests that precipitation and atmospheric rivers are increasing in intensity and frequency. More recently, in July of this year a kayaker drowned on Mendenhall Lake in strong currents at the outflow of the glacier, a section of river which has only been exposed in the last decade as the Mendenhall Glacier retreats. Anyone who recreates outdoors in Alaska knows that many activities have inherent risk — the changing severity and frequency of these risks as the climate changes is yet another facet to consider when decision-making.

It’s interesting to consider how the risks for outdoor recreation are changing. While in some ways adventurers can be safer than ever with the popularization of satellite communication devices, modern safety equipment, and safety education — new risks are appearing and disappearing as our landscape is altered by climate change.