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Scientists are on the water this summer, gathering information about a once-mysterious habitat - the large and varied gardens of colorful corals that cover parts of the Alaska seafloor. What they learn could prompt new restrictions for commercial seafood harvests. Though often associated with tropical locations, corals and associated sponges are also important features of the Alaska marine ecosystem. Some Alaska marine sites are believed to hold the world's most diverse and abundant deep-sea cor...
As election officials count votes in Alaska’s first-ever statewide election by mail, they have rejected thousands of submitted ballots, including one in six from a Western Alaska state House district, causing concern from observers who say the state’s process is disenfranchising voters, particularly Alaska Natives. At last week’s meeting of the National Congress of American Indians in Anchorage, Michelle Sparck delivered a speech on behalf of a group whose mission is to improve Alaska Native voting rates. When she described the issue, “ther...
Western Alaska villagers have endured the worst chum salmon runs on record, several years of anemic Chinook salmon runs in the Yukon and Kuskokwim rivers, harvest closures from the Bering Sea coast to Canada’s Yukon Territory and such dire conditions that they relied on emergency shipments of salmon from elsewhere in Alaska just to have food to eat. Many of those suffering see one way to provide some quick relief: Large vessels trawling for pollock and other groundfish in the industrial-scale fisheries of the Bering Sea, they say, must stop i...
When Dr. Anne Zink began working as the state’s chief medical officer in the summer of 2019, she had a vision of transforming the state’s health system into one that promotes health holistically rather than one that simply responds to sickness. Then came COVID-19. At least a third of Alaskans have tested positive for the COVID virus as of the May 11 count, according to the state’s data hub, while more than 3,700 have been hospitalized and 1,235 have died. Now, two years after the pandemic overt...
