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Break out the flashlights. When a full lunar eclipse takes place on the shortest day of the year, the planet may just get awfully dark. The upcoming Dec. 21 full moon -- besides distinguishing itself from the others in 2010 by undergoing a total eclipse -- will also take place on the same date as the solstice (the winter solstice if you live north of the equator, and the summer solstice if you live to the south). Winter solstice is the shortest day of the year in the Northern Hemisphere and marks the official beginning of winter. The sun is...

Had it appeared on the SciFi Channel, “Supervolcano” would have received little attention other than a few random reviews. Instead, it was broadcast on Discovery and was hyped even to the point of having trailers appear in movie theaters. According to the advertising, “This is a true story. It just hasn’t happened yet.”

Determining a reliable calendrical age of the Santorini (Minoan) eruption is necessary to place the impact of the eruption into its proper context within Bronze Age society in the Aegean region. The high-resolution record of the deposition of volcanically produced acids on polar ice sheets, as available in the SO42-time series from ice cores (a direct signal), and the high-resolution record of the climatic impact of past volcanism inferred in tree rings (a secondary signal) have been widely used to assign a 1628/1627 age to the eruption. The layer of ice in the GISP2 (Greenland) ice core corresponding to...

A thought about ice cores just occurred to me, and I need someone in the know to verify or refute this argument. Scientists claim to know what the temperature was in past years primarily by drilling ice core samples. They measure levels of specific gasses, like carbon dioxide, that are trapped within the layers of the ice, and somehow they calculate the temperature for that time based off of "certain assumptions" (none of which are mentioned in the wikipedia article). That is rather dubious inandof itself, but I want to take that thought in a different direction. We all know...

A restless volcano near Alaska's most populated region is being watched by scientist and officials, who warned on Thursday of the risk of clouds of ash and a tsunami from a possible eruption. The intensifying rumblings in the past few weeks at Augustine Volcano, an island peak 175 miles southwest of Anchorage in Cook Inlet, have produced a series of steam explosions, releases of sulfur gas and signs that there may be an eruption similar to events in 1986 and 1976 which sent ash clouds as high as 40,000 feet, scientists said. There has even been an increase of 1...

Alaska's Mount Churchill volcano erupted some 1,200 years ago, spreading ash from Canada to Germany... Mount Churchill is also an impressive volcano, the tallest on land in the United States and one of the towering, snowy peaks of Alaska's Wrangell-St. Elias Mountains. But Churchill's blast in A.D. 843 ejected just 12 cubic miles (50 cubic km) of ash, a layer now called the White River Ash, according to the new study, published in the September 2014 issue of the journal Geology... If moderate volcanic eruptions can spread ash for thousands of miles, then these blowouts may be more hazardous than...

A federal judge has struck down Alaska's first-in-the-nation ban on gay marriages. U.S. District Judge Timothy Burgess on Sunday said the ban violates the U.S. constitutional guarantee of due process and equal protection. The state could appeal to the 9th Circuit Court, where chances of it winning were slim since the federal appeals court already has ruled against Idaho and Nevada, which made similar arguments.

Fortunately for the GOP, there are six races that lean toward Republicans: Alaska, Arkansas, Georgia, Iowa, Kentucky and Louisiana. We’ll refer to these states as the “Maroon 6” (because maroon is somewhere between red and purple). In each Maroon 6 state, the Republican candidate has a 65 percent to 75 percent chance of winning, according to the FiveThirtyEight forecast.

Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, is a tea party stalwart.   Sen. Pat Roberts, R-Kan., narrowly defeated a tea party opponent in the Republican Senate primary this year.   Ted Cruz has a perfect 100 percent rating from the American Conservative Union.   Pat Roberts has an 84 percent rating from the ACU.   Yet this week Cruz will be in Kansas campaigning for Roberts in an election that is crucial for GOP hopes of retaking the Senate. The reason is simple. Fox News quotes Cruz explaining, “Roberts stood by my side in the fight to defund Obamacare, and he...

CNN) -- You are told -- twice-- that your son has died, once by a state trooper and then again by a local police officer. What do you do? Express thanks, and perhaps frustration, that it's not true. An Alaska family rode this emotional roller coaster earlier this week. And on Friday, Justin Priest -- the man whose parents believed had died -- said his family is "very private," but hopes some good comes from getting the story out so no one else has to endure a similar nightmare ride. "We wanted to put a little pressure on the police...

A Supreme Court order legalizing same-sex marriage in five states reverberated further on Thursday, with the attorney general of West Virginia conceding that its ban on same-sex marriage was no longer defensible but South Carolina officials vowing to keep fighting to restrict marriage to a man and a woman. Since the Supreme Court decision on Monday and a ruling from a federal circuit court on Tuesday, new developments have appeared almost hourly as gay-rights advocates press for action in nine other states: Alaska, Arizona, Colorado, Kansas, Montana, North Carolina, South Carolina, West Virginia and Wyoming.

Bernadette Adams became the first known woman in Barrow history to harpoon a whale, when she struck the bowhead pictured here 20 miles offshore from the Arctic community. Bernadette Adams remembers pitching fits as a young girl out on the sea ice wanting desperately to go out whaling with her father. With no brothers, her hunting career started at a young age. And last week, she made local history as the first woman in the community to harpoon a bowhead. Usually women don’t go out in boats with the whaling crews. And while community members in Barrow are touting her...

I do not understand how the U.S. leaders can poo poo the potential threat of a pandemic. If they're trying to prevent panic, they're doing a poor job of it. My self, I'd feel more secure if I saw some effort at containment. Aparently none of the "highly trained" people ever read a history book. The Black Plague was too far back for these people to think about, but the world wide influenza epidimic of the early 1900's should be close enough for a look. This was a time of coal fired steam ships. Most travelers would have died weeks...

I spent nearly five years in Panama, working for the Army.   It was a formative experience that forever shaped my life.   I intend to visit Panama again someday.  While there, I met and became friends with Dr. Nickolas D. Smythe.   We had a number of conversations about science, biology, and research.   I always have appreciated being around exceptionally smart people, and Dr. Smythe was one.   I have lost track of him, and I hope that he is doing well. His research was centered around the domestication of the agouti.   It was a very ambitious project, as the number of...

At least 35,000 walruses have beached themselves on a remote Alaskan coastline in a phenomenon blamed on the melting of arctic ice due to climate change, experts said Wednesday. Initially there had been only 1,500 of the tusked pinnipeds counted on one beach, but in recent days that number has exploded. "Our best estimate is almost a 24-fold increase," said Megan Ferguson of the Aerial Surveys of Arctic Marine Mammals.

The Republican has surged to a lead against Sen. Mark Begich (D) in recent polls in the race that’s likely to be critical to the balance of Senate power. Though the race is expected to remain close, some Democrats are worried that Begich is playing catch-up in a state where it’s tough to make up ground for their party. http://thehill.com/blogs/ballot-box/senate-races/219533-gop-surges-in-alaska-senate-race

For a guy who claimed to spend 17 years in China as a confidant of Kublai Khan, Marco Polo left a surprisingly skimpy paper trail. No Asian sources mention the footloose Italian. The only record of his 13th-century odyssey through the Far East is the hot air of his own Travels, which was actually an “as told to” penned by a writer of romances. But a set of 14 parchments, now collected and exhaustively studied for the first time, give us a raft of new stories about Polo’s journeys and something notably missing from his own account: maps. If genuine,...

It's something you would expect from a sanity challenged fringe blog or from the usual suspects such as the Democratic Underground or the Daily Kos. Instead the latest example of global warming wackiness is coming from the Gray Lady herself, the New York Times. This is an actual unchallenged quote in a Times article by Jennifer A. Kingson “Alaska is going to be the next Florida by the end of the century.”

<p>An Alaska television reporter wrapped up a live segment on medical marijuana with a curse and an "I quit," telling viewers she will work instead to legalize pot in the state.</p> <p>Charlo Greene revealed she was in fact the owner of the "cannabis club" featured in her story on Anchorage's KTVA 10 p.m. broadcast Sunday.</p>

The U.S. Senate Energy Committee advanced a bill on Wednesday that would force congressional approval of TransCanada's proposed Keystone XL oil pipeline project, but the measure seems unlikely to be taken up by the full Senate. The bill, the latest effort by lawmakers to breathe life into the long-delayed pipeline from Canada to the U.S. Gulf Coast, will languish without a commitment from Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid to bring it to a vote. The measure, from Democratic Senator Mary Landrieu of Louisiana and Republican Senators John Hoeven of North Dakota and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, would take a decision...