Alaska

The Interior Department's Office of Inspector General is undertaking a preliminary investigation into phone calls made by Secretary Ryan Zinke to Alaska’s Republican Sens. Lisa Murkowski and Dan Sullivan, warning them that that they could lose their standing with the Trump administration in light of Murkowski’s vote against repealing the Affordable Care Act.

Applicants are asking Alaska's Department of Natural Resources for permission to begin hundreds of acres of kelp farming on the state's tidelands, reports Alaska Public Media. Last year, the state got requests to lease around 18 acres for various types of mariculture; this year, kelp farming would occupy two-thirds of the 1,000 acres of lease requests.

At least the third study in a year has found that the rate of sea level rise is increasing. A recent report in Nature Climate Change said that the rate of sea level rise had grown from 2.2 millimeters per year in 1993 to a 3.3-millimeter annual rise in 2014.

With the release of the 2018 White House Budget proposal, environmentalists and public lands advocates are worried over a $1.4 billion (10.9 percent) cut to the Interior Department. The proposal targets federal lands, opens oil drilling in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR), and cancels money set aside to bring economic opportunities to Appalachia — often in the form of farming ventures.

Salmon fishermen are among many groups in Alaska upset by the EPA’s announcement that the Pebble Limited Partnership can now file for a mining permit in Bristol Bay, in the southwestern part of the state.

Secretary of State Rex Tillerson signed an agreement to fight climate change this week during his trip to Alaska for the Arctic Council, a multinational group that includes Russia and Canada. “The Arctic agreement Tillerson signed with foreign ministers from the other seven nations of the council, including Russia, Canada and Norway, made only a passing reference to the Paris pact,” reports Reuters. “It noted ‘entry into force’ of the pact and its implementation and called for global action to reduce greenhouse gas pollution.”

The 2017 Alaska salmon catch could be twice as much as last year’s, with projections of 204 million fish compared 122 million in 2016, says Alaska Dispatch News. “The total dockside value of the 2016 salmon fishery barely topped $406 million, the lowest in 14 years,” says ADN.

A mallard duck captured near Fairbanks, Alaska, and tested as part of a surveillance program was infected with highly pathogenic avian influenza, said USDA. It was the first confirmation of bird flu in the United States since June 2015, at the end of the worst bird flu epidemic to strike U.S. poultry flocks.

In the first U.S. communities to experience climate change firsthand, warmer weather and shifting weather patterns have hampered the ability of Alaska Native families to harvest the caribou, walrus and other subsistence foods they have relied on for more than a millennium, reports NPR’s The Salt. “The debate here isn't over whether climate change is happening. For these rural communities, the question is whether they can continue to survive there,” the story says.

The 2016 Alaska salmon harvest is expected to drop 40 percent from last year’s count, says Alaska Dispatch News, primarily due to a routine decline in pink salmon numbers that hits every two years.

Algae blooms are poisoning marine life farther north than they ever have, says a new study by the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Alaska’s crabbing industry will be hit by ocean acidification, but it isn’t clear exactly how, says Alaska Dispatch News.

Two small startups "with a starkly different vision of how to grow produce year-around, under uniquely Alaskan conditions," hope to reap profits, along with vegetables, in a state where the food chain is long and prices are high, says the New York Times.

Some 800 miles west of Anchorage, in the Bering sea, sits the island of St. Paul, the source of snow crab eaten in the rest of the United States and globally. “Over the last few years, 10 billion snow crabs have unexpectedly vanished from the Bering Sea,” writes Julia O’Malley in FERN’s …