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Alaska Science Pod
Science writer Ned Rozell has accompanied researchers all over Alaska and given firsthand accounts of discoveries, triumphs and pitfalls of field work conducted in the Last Frontier. Through in-depth conversations, Ned gives voice to research stories ranging from volcanoes, earthquakes and auroras to climate change, anthropology, paleontology and wildfires. Any natural phenomena in Alaska and the people who study them are fair game. Ned has spent more than 25 years writing hundreds of science stories for the UAF Geophysical Institute's weekly column, the Alaska Science Forum: https://www.gi.alaska.edu/alaska-science-forum. New episodes drop on the first Tuesday of the month.
Episodes
11 episodes
Ep. 11: Field Notes: Into the Ghost Forest
At the height of summer in 2021, Ned accompanied University of Alaska Fairbanks ecologist Ben Gaglioti to a ghost forest a glacier had run over in Southeast Alaska. Ned and Ben spent about two weeks near La Perouse Glacier, the one that ran...
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Season 1
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Episode 11
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28:28
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Ep. 10: Thirty Years of Permafrost Research with Vladimir Romanovsky, Part 2/2
Permafrost researcher Vladimir Romanovsky, professor emeritus at the Geophysical Institute, reflects on his career and surprising changes to Alaska's permafrost during his 30-year career. This episode is part 2/2 of a conversation wit...
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Season 1
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Episode 10
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39:09
Ep. 9: Thirty Years of Permafrost Research with Vladimir Romanovsky, Part 1/2
Vladimir Romanovsky is retiring after 30 years of studying permafrost at UAF's Geophysical Institute. He enters professor emeritus status while seeing changes in Alaska's frozen ground he never anticipated when scientists spoke of a new ice...
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Season 1
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Episode 9
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47:03
Ep. 8: From Alaska to New Zealand, the bar-tailed godwit with Dan Ruthrauff
Bird biologist Dan Ruthrauff of the USGS Science Center in Anchorage describes the bar-tailed godwit, a bird that every fall flies from Alaska to New Zealand without stopping. That’s a week to nine days straight in the air!
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Season 1
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Episode 8
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35:33
Ep. 7: Calls of killer whales with Hannah Myers
Hannah Myers is a graduate student and a killer whale linguist. She has listened to hundreds of underwater recordings from which she can identify distinct families of whales. Myers and other researchers found that killer whales hang offshore of...
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Season 1
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Episode 7
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36:00
Ep. 6: Martin Truffer and the surging Malaspina Glacier
Martin Truffer is a glaciologist at the University of Alaska Fairbanks Geophysical Institute. He reports that the Malaspina Glacier is more than three thousand feet deep in some places, describes how his research group is monitoring its progres...
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Season 1
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Episode 6
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29:40
Ep. 5: Randy Brown and the Bering cisco, a tasty Alaska fish
Randy Brown is a biologist with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in Fairbanks. For years, he lived off the land in Alaska on a tributary of the upper Yukon River. In this episode, Randy describes the detective work he and others used to learn...
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Season 1
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Episode 5
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37:39
Ep. 4: GI's 75th Anniversary with Roger Smith: Past, present and future of the institute
Roger Smith is a space physicist who moved to Alaska from London in the 80s. He became the director of the Geophysical Institute in 2000. Roger describes what the early days at the GI were like and why the institute has endured for 75 years.
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Season 1
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Episode 4
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48:09
Ep. 3: Sherry Shimpson's "Telling Raven Stories," read by Lee Zirnheld
Sherry Simpson, one of the best descriptive writers in Alaska — and possibly the world — died in 2020 of a brain tumor. Science writer Ned Rozell worked with Sherry at the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner, where he soon noticed that no on...
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Season 1
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Episode 3
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26:15
Ep. 2: Seismologist Carl Tape investigates the 1900 earthquake near Kodiak, Alaska
In this episode, seismologist Carl Tape transforms into both historian and detective to investigate the strongest earthquake on the planet in the year 1900, somewhere near Kodiak, Alaska. (30 minutes)
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Season 1
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Episode 2
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29:39
Ep. 1: Cathy Cahill talks innovation in unmanned aircraft
Cathy Cahill directs the Alaska Center for Unmanned Aircraft Systems Integration at the University of Alaska Fairbanks Geophysical Institute. Her fleet of vehicles encompasses those too intelligent to call “drones” to tiny aircraft fitting in o...
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Season 1
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Episode 1
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40:32