A large swath of Denali National Park, one of Alaska’s premier travel destinations, has closed for the summer tourist season weeks early after heightened landslide activity from excessive thawing of a mountain slope made the park’s only access road unsafe. The National Park Service announced the closure late on Tuesday. Gradual but sustained sliding of the hillside has made travel treacherous around the halfway point of the 92-mile (148-km) access road, near a site called Pretty Rocks, the agency said. A shuttle bus passes the Pretty Rocks site in Denali National Park, Alaska, U.S., July 21, 2020. REUTERS/Yereth Rosen The “changing climate is driving frozen ground to thaw,” Denali park superintendent Don Striker said in a statement, which described the pace of land movement at Pr...
Read MoreTag: Alaska
Fifty years ago, Patrick Pletnikoff spent his summers stripping blubber from the carcasses of seals clubbed to death in Alaska's annual harvest, competing with other young men to show who wielded the fastest blade. Now he's fighting for a bigger prize: to transform his native St. George Island's fortunes and protect dwindling colonies of northern fur seals by creating Alaska's first marine sanctuary in the surrounding waters - a move that would empower local people to limit fishing for the seals' prey. Commercial sealing was once the lifeblood of St. George, a treeless speck of volcanic rock far from the U.S. mainland. But the indigenous Unangan community has struggled to find a new niche in the decades since the trade was banned, and there are now less than 60 inhabitants left. ...
Read MoreAlaska elected officials and cruise industry representatives have joined members of the Ketchikan community to welcome the return of the first large cruise ship to Alaskan shores since 2019. U.S. Senator Lisa Murkowski, Alaska Lieutenant Governor Kevin Meyer, and City of Ketchikan Mayor Bob Sivertsen joined community members in Ketchikan at an event hosted by Cruise Lines International Association (CLIA), the trade association for the global cruise industry, as Royal Caribbean’s Serenade of the Seas became the first large cruise ship to return to Alaska following the suspension of cruise operations due to the pandemic. Rhapsody of the Seas - Darwin Australia The event on Friday marked the return of cruise tourism to Alaska nearly two years since cruise ships last operated in the ...
Read MoreWarming Arctic at the frontier of climate insight and risk, experts say
The environmental transformation happening in the Arctic is key to understanding the potential global impacts of climate change, an Alaska Native leader and a polar explorer told the Reuters Next conference on Monday. With climate change warming the Arctic twice as fast as the overall planet, newly possible commercial activities have also raised questions about responsibility and risk at the top of the world, an insurance expert said. FILE PHOTO: Greenpeace's Arctic Sunrise ship navigates through floating ice in the Arctic Ocean, September 15, 2020. Picture taken with a drone. REUTERS/Natalie Thomas/File Photo Native peoples’ observations of changes in the Arctic - such as diseases in fish, or shifts in the time of year when mountain snow melts - are key to understanding how clim...
Read MoreIn Alaska’s annual battle of heavyweights, a salmon-chomping bruin named 747 – like the jetliner – has emerged as the most fabulously fat. The bear, one of more than 2,200 brown bears roaming Alaska’s Katmai National Park and Preserve, was victorious on Tuesday after a week of frenzied online voting in what has become an international sensation: Fat Bear Week. Winner 747 was a worthy champion, the park said in a statement. “This year he really packed on the pounds, looking like he was fat enough to hibernate in July and yet continuing to eat until his belly seemed to drag along the ground by late September,” the park said. There couldn’t have been a more epic matchup than the championship face-off between two aptly named bears: 747 and Chunk, aka Bear 32. In the end, 747 pulled ahea...
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