#reindeer-ecology

#reindeer-ecology

In April 2024, Churchill's waste management facility-an old military building known as L5-burned to the ground. Spontaneous combustion in the gaseous garbage pile was the likely cause. The warehouse had been capable of storing up to three years' worth of the town's garbage at a time. Overnight, the town's 900 or so residents were left with nothing.

In the pristine High Arctic sits the Kitsissut island cluster, also known as the Carey Islands, nestled between northwest Greenland and northeast Canada. The surrounding seas are perilous, and traveling there is difficult even with modern boats. But new archaeological evidence suggests ancient humans managed to sail to the islands, too. Early settlers lived on the islands between 4,500 and 2,700 years ago.

An unnamed tourist saw it and told Aidan Moore, who works for Alcatraz City Cruises. Moore told SFGATE that he was initially skeptical, but the guest's iPhone footage left little room for doubt. The video shows, not a sea lion or an otter, but an actual Canis latrans, doggedly dogpaddling, then clambering out of the water, noticeably shaky and struggling to settle tired paws on the craggy rocks.

He had flown in from Mar-a-Lago and, he told me, was there to observe. The next day, he watched as Åsa Rennermalm, a Rutgers University professor who studies polar regions, sat onstage with European foreign ministers and spoke out against cuts to U.S. science funding. "A leading US Arctic scientist is on stage absolutely ripping her country to the delight of the audience," Dans wrote on X. "Embarassing." He punctuated his post with an American-flag emoji.

Recently, Anchorage, Alaska's largest city with nearly 400,000 residents, has just recorded its snowiest January on record. Tucked in between the mighty Cook Inlet and pushed right up against the Chugach Mountains, Anchorage sits in prime location for some serious snow totals. Moisture from pacific storms builds up over the inlet, and thanks to orographic lift caused by the mountains, forces that moisture to drop over Anchorage. Thanks to Alaska's northernly location, that moisture often falls in the form of snow.

Polar bears are the poster children of climate changeand for good reason. These giant bears hunt, mate and spend their days hanging out on Arctic sea ice, which is rapidly disappearing as the climate warms. But some polar bears, it seems, are far more resilient than we realized: new research suggests that in one region, the bears are adapting to the declining sea ice.

Because we're homeotherms, we assume all mammals work the way we do. But in recent years, as improvements in technology allowed researchers to more easily track small animals and their metabolisms in the wild, we're starting to find a lot more weirdness.

Decades of successful scientific collaboration could be at risk if Europe-US political relations continue to fray over trade and defense issues. For more than 30 years, Arctic nations have worked together across the physical, biological and social sciences to understand one of the world's fastest changing regions. Since the late 1970s, the Arctic has lost around 33,000 square miles of sea ice each year roughly the same area as Czechia.

Animals' risk of becoming roadkill depends on several factors, including how many vehicles are on the road, how many animals are on the road, and how animals and human drivers behave, explains Tom Langen, a professor of biology at Clarkson University, who studies animal-vehicle collisions. DST can minimize these collisions, however.

"I feel very lucky to have them on the farm. It's an important thing to try and keep a healthy population of them. They are absolutely beautiful," he said.

The next morning, I checked the critter-cams and saw the bear again, now captured by a camera I'd placed by a little mesh-covered opening near the small basement under my house. I watched as a massive shape emerged from the hole. My brain refused to believe it. The bear looked too large to fit in that tiny gap. I watched it again, shocked. My hands started to sweat.