Sorted by date Results 1 - 25 of 32
ANCHORAGE, Alaska (AP) — Alaska needs a comprehensive review effort to improve aviation safety because its fatal and non-fatal accident rates are far higher than the national average, the National Transportation Safety Board said Thursday. The NTSB issued a safety recommendation to the Federal Aviation Administration calling for the formation of a group focused on safety to better review, rank and integrate Alaska's unique aviation needs into the FAA safety enhancement process. "We need to marshal the resources of the FAA to tackle aviation s...
ANCHORAGE, Alaska (AP) — An Alaska man carrying garbage to his shed had to take cover inside when a curious bull moose decided to join him. A Ring home security camera captured Curtis Phelps trapped inside the shed while the moose, with just one antler, tried to push his way inside. The moose eventually moved on and Phelps escaped after calling his wife, Amy, with his cellphone. "He's like, let me know when I can get out of the shed," she said Friday. "I'm stuck in the shed." The Phelps live in south Anchorage, where moose are regular v...
ANCHORAGE, Alaska (AP) — A U.S. Coast Guard vessel collided with a U.S. Navy boat, injuring nine people, including one critically, off Alaska's Kodiak Island. The accident occurred Wednesday evening in Women's Bay near Kodiak's Coast Guard base, said Lt. Comm. Scott McCann, a Coast Guard Alaska District spokesman in Juneau. A Coast Guard 38-foot (11.6 meter) special purpose training boat had just completed a helicopter hoist training session with aircraft from the agency's air base, McCann said. Training sessions are aimed at maintaining p...
ANCHORAGE, Alaska (AP) — Alaska’s northern fur seal population for three decades has been classified as depleted, but the marine mammals are showing up in growing numbers at an unlikely location _ a tiny island that forms the tip of an active undersea volcano. Vents on Bogoslof Island continue to spew mud, steam and sulfurous gases two years after an eruption sent ash clouds into the path of jetliners passing over the Bering Sea. Still, northern fur seal moms find the remote island’s rocky beaches perfect for giving birth and mothering pups....
ANCHORAGE, Alaska (AP) — Biological oceanographer Sonia Batten experienced her lightbulb moment on the perils of too many salmon three years ago as she prepared a talk on the most important North Pacific seafood you'll never see on a plate — zooplankton. Zooplanktons nourish everything from juvenile salmon to seabirds to giant whales. But as Batten examined 15 years of data collected by instruments on container ships near the Aleutian Islands, she noticed a trend: zooplankton was abundant in even-number years and less abundant in odd...
ANCHORAGE, Alaska (AP) — It's not America's Top 40, but it's a cutting edge song. Federal marine biologists for the first time have recorded singing by one of the rarest whales on the planet, the North Pacific right whale. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration researchers used moored acoustic recorders to capture repeated patterns of calls made by male North Pacific right whales. It's the first time right whale songs in any population have been documented, said NOAA Fisheries marine biologist Jessica Crance on Wednesday from S...
ANCHORAGE, Alaska (AP) — The Yupik Eskimo village of Kotlik on Alaska's northwest coast relies on a cold, hard blanket of sea ice to protect homes from vicious winter Bering Sea storms. Frigid north winds blow down from the Arctic Ocean, freeze saltwater and push sea ice south. The ice normally prevents waves from forming and locks onto beaches, walling off villages. But not this year. In February, southwest winds brought warm air and turned thin sea ice into "snow cone ice" that melted or blew off. When a storm pounded Norton Sound, water o...
ANCHORAGE, Alaska (AP) — The National Park Service improperly banned an Alaska moose hunter from using a hovercraft on a river through a national preserve, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled Tuesday in a unanimous decision. The court limited the National Park Service's authority to enforce laws and regulations on state-owned rivers in Alaska. Justices rejected the agency's argument that the river was "public land" for regulatory authority and that the agency's water rights interest gave it rule-making authority. The outcome was a victory for moose h...
ANCHORAGE, Alaska (AP) — The oil and gas industry should not be spared the pain of the partial government shutdown, according to the chairman of the U.S. House Natural Resources Committee. Rep. Raul Grijalva (gri-HAWL-vah) on Tuesday sent a letter to Acting Interior Secretary David Bernhardt objecting to the department changing plans to allow employees to work on upcoming offshore lease sales, seismic permits and a five-year offshore oil and gas leasing plan in Alaska and elsewhere. "One of the most striking features of the current government s...
ANCHORAGE, Alaska (AP) — Thousands of Pacific walruses have again gathered on the northwest shore of Alaska as the Chukchi Sea approaches its annual sea ice minimum. Residents of the Inupiaq village of Point Lay on Aug. 22 reported hearing walruses, said Andrea Medeiros, spokeswoman in Alaska for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Spotters taking part in an annual aerial marine mammal survey on Aug. 30 photographed walruses on a barrier island near Point Lay. An estimated 25,000 animals were there, Medeiros said. "The herd is 2 to 3 miles (...
ANCHORAGE, Alaska (AP) — Federal wildlife officials are documenting a die-off of Alaska seabirds stretching from north of the Bering Strait to the Gulf of Alaska that may be connected to a trend of warming ocean water. Carcasses examined so far have shown no indication of disease, and tests are pending for harmful algal toxins. Seabirds have been found emaciated and starved, and changed ocean conditions may have affected prey. "As in the past, these die-offs have been associated with unusually warm water conditions," said Katherine Kuletz, a U...
ANCHORAGE, Alaska (AP) — A federal agency wants its wooly mammoth tusk back. The Bureau of Land Management in Alaska on Tuesday asked the public's help in recovering an approximately 10,000-year-old tusk stolen from the Campbell Creek Science Center, an interpretive center in east Anchorage. The woolly mammoth is Alaska's official state fossil. The tusk was on display when the center was burglarized March 8. Anchorage police say a thief broke in through a window and took only the tusk, which weighs 100 pounds (45.4-kilogram). The curved tusk i...
ANCHORAGE, Alaska (AP) — President Donald Trump's pledge to make the United States "energy dominant" is extending to Arctic Ocean waters despite a pending lawsuit and lack of approval for a required five-year drilling plan. The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management on Thursday opened a 30-day comment period seeking solicitations of interest in lease blocks within the Beaufort Sea off Alaska's north coast for a sale in 2019. Expressions of interest help shape the scope of lease sales, and if there's no interest expressed, sales can be cancelled. A...
ANCHORAGE, Alaska (AP) — The U.S. Navy has begun five weeks of submarine training and testing off Alaska's north coast that will include breaching the massive underwater vessels through Arctic sea ice. The exercises, which also include the collection of scientific data, are dubbed Ice Exercise 2018, or ICEX18, and are scheduled every other year. Rear Adm. James Pitts, commander of the Undersea Warfare Development Center, said in an announcement that the Navy builds experience with every ICEX. "We are constantly testing new tactics, t...
ANCHORAGE, Alaska (AP) — Climbers on North America's tallest mountain may have to start packing out more of their poop after a researcher determined a glacier in which much of it has been dumped over the past decade probably is not decomposing the human waste. Michael Loso, a glacier geologist, calculates that 36,000 climbers between 1951 and 2012 deposited 152,000 to 215,000 pounds (69 to 97 metric tons) of feces onto Kahiltna Glacier, part of the most popular route to Denali's summit. For more than a decade, the National Park Service has r...
ANCHORAGE, Alaska (AP) — Does a bear leave scat in the woods? The answer is obvious but the effects on an ecosystem may not be. A study by Oregon State University researchers concludes that brown and black bears, and not birds, as commonly thought, are primary distributers of small fruit seeds in southeast Alaska, spreading the seeds through their excrement. "Bears are essentially like farmers," said Taal Levi, an Oregon State assistant professor. "By planting seeds everywhere, they promote a vegetation community that feeds them." Seed d...
ANCHORAGE, Alaska (AP) — A federal grand jury has indicted six former employees of an Alaska commuter airline on charges of stealing mail over two years, including 343 computers headed to schools in rural villages. The six ramp agents were employed by Ravn Air. U.S. Attorney Bryan Schroder said the six were charged with stealing Apple computers and other mail, conspiracy and possession of stolen mail. The value of the items stolen from March 2015 to April 2017 was $489,000. Besides computers, the men are suspected of stealing cellphones, c...
ANCHORAGE, Alaska (AP) — President Donald Trump's plan to open America's oceans to petroleum drilling drew condemnation from West Coast and Florida governors but was welcomed in the state where most lease sales could be held. Alaska Gov. Bill Walker, an independent facing re-election this year, embraced Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke's proposed 19 lease sales in the state, including six in the potentially oil rich but environmentally sensitive Arctic Ocean waters. "The Department of Interior's draft five-year offshore leasing plan is an i...
ANCHORAGE, Alaska (AP) — Sometime next April, pregnant cows in the Porcupine Caribou Herd in Canada will take the lead in an annual migration of nearly 200,000 animals north to Alaska. From winter grounds in Canada's Yukon Territory, the caribou traveling in small and large groups will cross rivers and gaps in the mighty Brooks Range on the 400-mile (643-kilometer) journey. Their destination is the coastal plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, a strip of flat tundra between the mountains and Arctic Ocean. The plain provides food and a...
ANCHORAGE, Alaska (AP) — America within a few years could be extracting oil from federal waters in the Arctic Ocean, but it won't be from a remote drilling platform. Federal regulators are taking comments on a draft environmental statement for the Liberty Project, a proposal by a subsidiary of Houston-based Hilcorp to create an artificial gravel island that would hold production wells, a processing facility and the start of an undersea pipeline carrying oil to shore and connections to the trans-Alaska pipeline. The drilling would be the f...
ANCHORAGE, Alaska (AP) — New research aims to find out why highly endangered beluga whales in Alaska's Cook Inlet have failed to recover despite protective measures. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has awarded more than $1.3 million to the state for three years of research involving the white whales. "While we know what we believe caused the initial decline, we're not sure what's causing the population to remain suppressed," said Mandy Keogh, a wildlife physiologist with the Alaska Department of Fish and Game. A p...
ANCHORAGE, Alaska (AP) — Thousands of Pacific walrus are coming to Alaska's northwest shore again in the absence of summer sea ice and not all are surviving. A survey Monday of a mile of coastline near the Inupiaq Eskimo village of Point Lay found 64 dead walruses, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service told The Associated Press. Most of the animals were younger than a year old. The cause of death is not known, said agency spokeswoman Andrea Medeiros, but stampedes — set off when startled walruses rush to the sea, crushing smaller animals — are a...
ANCHORAGE, Alaska (AP) — Federal researchers in the Bering Sea have made contact with one of the rarest whales on Earth. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration scientists photographed two animals in the eastern stock of North Pacific right whales and obtained a biopsy sample from one. Just 30 to 50 of the critically endangered animals remain from a population largely wiped out by whalers. NOAA research biologist Jessica Crance used an acoustic recorder to hear faint sounds Sunday of a right whale west of Alaska's Bristol Bay. After m...
ANCHORAGE, Alaska (AP) — Petroleum exploration has largely ceased in federal waters off Alaska but an Italian multinational oil and gas company has received permission to move ahead with modest drilling plans on leases sold in 2005. The federal Bureau of Ocean Energy Management late Wednesday announced conditional approval of an exploratory drilling plan submitted by Eni US Operating Co. Inc., part of Eni S.p.A. The company plans to drill four exploration wells from the Spy Island drill site, an 11-acre (.04-square kilometer) artificial g...
ANCHORAGE, Alaska (AP) — Everybody needs a shoulder to lean on now and then. A walrus calf at the Alaska SeaLife Center in Seward, Alaska, is getting one 24 hours per day. Trained staff members, working in pairs, are touching, massaging and cuddling a calf all day and all night as part of its recuperation. The calf, estimated to be about 6 weeks old, was found last month without its mother several miles outside Nome. Walrus are highly social and spend two years with their mothers, said Jennifer Gibbins, marketing and communications director f...
