Reuters Reuters
21 May, 2021, 10:13 pm
Smoke rises from a hot spot in the Swan Lake Fire scar at the Kenai National Wildlife Refuge, Alaska, U.S., June 16, 2020. Photo by Dan White/AlaskaHandout via REUTERS
ANCHORAGE, Alaska (Reuters) – In the boreal forests of the planet’s far north, where the climate is warming faster than almost anywhere else in the world, some wildfires are surviving winter snows and sparking back up again in spring.
Now scientists from the Netherlands and Alaska have figured out how to calculate the scope of those “zombie fires” that smolder year-round in the peaty soil.
From 2002 to 2018, an average of about 1% of the burning in Alaska and in Canada’s Northwest Territories was caused by overwintering fires that survived from one summer to the next, according to a study https://go.nature.com/2RtzSCk, published Wednesday in Nature. But in one year, zombie fires accounted for 38% of the region’s burning.
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Years After the Pacific Marine Heat Wave, Ecosystem Shifts Persist
Researchers question whether Gulf of Alaska species will return to pre–heat wave conditions.
A humpback whale, one of the species affected by the Pacific marine heat wave, breaches in Kenai Fjords National Park in the Gulf of Alaska. Credit: Kaitlin Thoreson, National Park Service 3 May 2021
From 2014 to 2016, the Gulf of Alaska experienced the worst marine heat wave of the decade. From single-celled organisms to top predators, practically no level of the ecosystem was left unscathed. During the Pacific marine heat wave, tens of thousands of dead seabirds washed up on beaches, unusually low numbers of humpback whales arrived in their summer habitats, and toxic algal blooms spread along the West Coast of North America.
Petersburg Pilot -
May 20, 2021
When Lydia Martin got her admission letter from Columbia University, she didn t open it right away. She had just been turned down by two other universities and couldn t take anymore disappointment. Then the following day during first period, she decided to read the university s response which told her she got in. It was really surprising, said Martin, who will be entering the Ivy League university in New York as an earth science major. I had been holding out a bit of hope to get in obviously.
She had applied to about seven other universities, including University of Alaska Fairbanks, b.