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What if prized rare earth elements could be extracted from seaweed, avoiding the need to dig into the ground for the materials used in technology and renewable-energy equipment? That question will be addressed by a new project to examine whether those elements can be found in seaweed growing in the waters of Southeast Alaska. The University of Alaska Fairbanks-led project is funded by the U.S. Department of Energy as part of a broader push to find and produce for domestic rare earth elements. It is one of three department-funded “algal m...
Russian-caught pollock, cod, salmon and crab that is processed in China will no longer be legally allowed in U.S. markets, under an executive order issued Dec. 22 by President Joe Biden. The action seeks to close a loophole that the Russian seafood industry was able to use to skirt import sanctions put in place in 2022 in response to the invasion of Ukraine. The ban is now extended to any seafood caught in Russian waters or by Russian-flagged vessels, regardless whether the seafood has been “incorporated or substantially transformed into o...
With a deep reduction in oil revenues expected, Alaska is on track for an almost $1 billion budget hole in the coming year that will have to be filled with money from savings, according to a spending plan presented Dec. 14 by Gov. Mike Dunleavy. The governor described his budget for the year beginning next July 1 as “status quo” in most categories. “There’s no cuts in this budget,” he said during a news conference in Juneau. There are a few targeted areas with increases, however, including more staff to help process a backlog of food stamp ben...
The collapse of Western Alaska salmon runs has been among the most consequential climate change impacts in the rapidly warming Arctic over the past two years, according to an annual report assembled by a federal agency. The 2023 Arctic Report Card, released Dec. 12 by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, includes a special chapter on Alaska salmon among its updates to sea ice, air temperature and permafrost conditions in a region of the world that is warming up to four times as fast as the global average. Western Alaska salmon...
As Wrangell continues to deal with the landslide that killed six people, Alaskans face a long-term challenge: How to prevent tragedies in the future as mountainous regions of the state become more unstable. “These landslides affecting Alaskans are going to keep happening, and we need to get out in front of them,” said Gabriel Wolken, manager of the climate and cryosphere hazards program at the Alaska Division of Geological and Geophysical Surveys. The Nov. 20 landslide in Wrangell was the third deadly and rain-triggered landslide in Sou...
Alaska is warming at two or three times the U.S. rate, with impacts ranging from individuals’ health and safety to the military security of the nation, according to a new federal report. The Fifth National Climate Assessment, a multiagency scientific report issued Nov. 14 by the Biden administration in accordance with federal law, includes a chapter devoted specifically to Alaska. Among the most profound impacts of climate change in Alaska are threats to surface construction, such as roads, and buildings, which are now much more costly to maint...
Alaska’s minimum wage will increase on Jan. 1 from $10.85 to $11.73 an hour, in accordance with a law put in place by a 2014 citizen initiative, the state Department of Labor announced. The law mandates regular increases in the minimum wage to match inflation rates as determined by the Consumer Price Index in Anchorage. Compared to the rest of the nation, the state’s minimum wage is “a little bit middling right now,” said Joelle Hall, president of the Alaska AFL-CIO. It appears on track to stay that way for at least the near term. Even after t...
After recent years of record or near-record runs and harvests, Bristol Bay sockeye salmon numbers are expected to return to more average levels next year, according to state biologists. The 2024 Bristol Bay sockeye salmon run is expected to total 39 million fish, with a predicted range between about 25 million and 53 million fish, according to a preliminary forecast released Nov. 3 by the Alaska Department of Fish and Game. That is 35% lower than the average over the past 10 years but 6% higher than the long-term average for Bristol Bay, the...
Alaska fish-harvesting employment declined in 2022, a continuing yearslong slide caused by a variety of factors, according to an analysis by the state Department of Labor. Employment for people harvesting seafood dropped by about 25% from 2015 to 2022, according to the analysis, published in the November issue of Alaska Economic Trends, the department’s monthly research magazine. The industry lost ground compared to other sectors of the Alaska economy, the analysis found. Seafood harvesting accounted for 7.3% of Alaska jobs in July of 2021, b...
Chum salmon are now reproducing farther north in some North Slope rivers, researchers have confirmed. A University of Alaska Fairbanks team this fall found about 100 chum salmon that were spawning or had just spawned in the Anaktuvuk and Itkillik rivers. The rivers are tributaries of the Colville River, which flows into the Arctic Ocean. The discovery of salmon that far north was not a surprise since all five species of Alaska salmon have been spotted in the Arctic, said Peter Westley, an associate professor at UAF’s College of Fisheries and O...
Former President Jimmy Carter was honored Nov. 1 by the Alaska Wilderness League for his conservation work in the state. The Mardie Murie Lifetime Achievement Award recognized Carter’s role in creating and passing the 1980 Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act. “Alaska is a special place for many Americans, and President Carter was ahead of his time in understanding how protecting wild Alaska would outlive his White House tenure,” Kristen Miller, the organization’s executive director, said in a statement. “We honor and celebrate...
Alaska’s industrial development agency has sued the Biden administration in an attempt to revive its Arctic National Wildlife Refuge oil and gas leases. The lawsuit filed Oct. 18 by the Alaska Industrial Development and Export Authority alleges that the Department of the Interior violated federal laws and its own regulations when it canceled the leases last month. Interior’s actions were politically motivated and illegally deprived AIDEA and the state of the economic benefits that would come from drilling in the refuge’s coastal plain, an area...
A year after state officials imposed unprecedented shutdowns on crab fishing in the Bering Sea, the snow crab population is in even worse shape than it was last year, when the Alaska Department of Fish and Game canceled the 2022-23 harvest. Survey results were presented Oct. 4 in Anchorage to the advisory panel of the North Pacific Fishery Management Council, which is charged by the federal government with managing fisheries in the region. The presentation was by Mike Litzow, a National Ocean and Atmospheric Administration Fisheries biologist...
Alaskans have high rates of chronic health conditions that can lead to death, and they are failing to follow lifestyles that would keep those chronic conditions at bay, according to a newly released state report. Two-thirds of Alaska adults are overweight or obese, nearly a third have high blood pressure and 27% have high cholesterol, according to the state Department of Health’s annual Alaska Chronic Disease Facts report. COVID-19 became the third-leading cause of death for Alaskans in 2021, after cancer and heart disease, and the various c...
Alaska’s ranked-choice voting system, which was in place for victories last year by the state’s first Democratic U.S. House member in half a century and the reelection of one of the last remaining moderate Republican U.S. senators, has become a test case for a nation struggling with political polarization. To fans, Alaska’s system shows how voters can reduce extremism and increase civility in government. To detractors, it is an overly complex system that fails to reflect true voter preferences and harms loyal party candidates, especially conser...
Alaska has gotten more money per capita from the federal infrastructure law passed in 2021 than any other state, according to participants at a news conference where the latest injection of funds for the state was announced. Alaska’s member of the U.S. House, Rep. Mary Peltola, and officials from the Biden administration used the event at the Alaska Native Heritage Center in Anchorage to announce awards totaling $100 million for broadband service in three rural areas. That brings Alaska broadband funding from the Infrastructure Investment a...
After a period when COVID-19 restrictions halted the spread of other respiratory diseases, Alaska had a big increase in influenza cases last fall and winter, state data shows. The overall influenza case load during the 2022-23 season was much higher than in prior years, reports a new bulletin issued by the epidemiology section of the Alaska Division of Public Health. Most notably, cases spiked much earlier in the season, in November and December, before dropping. There were five influenza deaths over the season, all among adults, according to...
The Biden administration on Sept. 6 announced it is canceling the last remaining oil and gas leases in the coastal plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Those seven leases, all held by the Alaska Industrial Development and Export Authority and sold in a controversial auction held in the final days of former President Donald Trump’s administration, have been in limbo ever since President Joe Biden was sworn into office. On his first day, Biden issued an order requiring a hold on Arctic refuge development to allow for further scrutiny o...
Environmental groups have asked a federal appeals court to overturn the Biden administration’s approval of exports from the proposed $44 billion project to sell North Slope natural gas. The Sierra Club and Center for Biological Diversity filed a petition with the U.S. Appeals Court for the District of Columbia on Friday, Aug. 11, seeking to reverse the Department of Energy approval granted in April to the state-led project that would send North Slope gas to Asian markets. The environmental groups argue that the massive project would unleash t...
Alaska Natives in certain rural areas of the state have the nation’s highest death rates from suicide and domestic violence and some of the highest rates of accidental deaths, while Asians and Latinos in the state have some of the nation’s lowest rates for deaths from a wide variety of conditions like heart disease and respiratory disorders, according to a new study. The study, published Thursday, Aug. 3, in The Lancet, one of the world’s oldest medical journals, is a sweeping review of health disparities across the nation, as shown in vario...
The math that more people are leaving Alaska than moving to the state, along with the aging of the adult population that remains, has put Alaska’s largest city and the state at risk of squandering economic opportunities, according to a three-year outlook released Aug. 2 by the nonprofit Anchorage Economic Development Corp. “Anchorage and Alaska are witnessing a weird combination of big economic opportunities that are mostly a sure thing, combined with economic threats that could lead to decades of stagnation and decline,” Bill Popp, the organ...
Elders and adults with disabilities will have more opportunities to get care at home or in a home-like setting under a bill that became state law when Gov. Mike Dunleavy signed it on July 29. The measure, Senate Bill 57, serves two broad categories of Alaskans who might otherwise have to move into assisted-care facilities: disabled adults, including youth who have aged out of the foster system, and elders. For disabled adults, the bill authorizes a system of adult host homes serving one or two people, a category into which foster parents’ h...
Tracking changes in permafrost can take years and sometimes decades, lags that cannot keep up with the transformations in the rapidly warming Arctic. Now scientists will be developing new technology to track those changes in real time, thanks to a project funded by Google. The company has awarded a $5 million grant to the Massachusetts-based Woodwell Climate Research Center to create a system combining satellite data with artificial intelligence to spot the changes as they occur. The project is led by Anna Liljedahl, an Alaska-based Woodwell...
Tracking changes in permafrost can take years and sometimes decades, lags that cannot keep up with the transformations in the rapidly warming Arctic. Now scientists will be developing new technology to track those changes in real time, thanks to a project funded by Google. The company has awarded a $5 million grant to the Massachusetts-based Woodwell Climate Research Center to create a system combining satellite data with artificial intelligence to spot the changes as they occur. The project is led by Anna Liljedahl, an Alaska-based Woodwell...
Thousands of aboveground tanks that store diesel fuel and other petroleum products would no longer be regulated by the state, under a proposal from the Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation. The proposal is to repeal regulation of what are known as Class 2 facilities, which are scattered throughout the state and store between 1,000 and 420,000 gallons of non-crude oil products such as diesel, heating oil and gasoline. If the state regulation is repealed, those Class 2 facilities will no longer be required to register their storage...