Doug O'Harra

They say there’s a lady in white who haunts the old auditorium of Anchorage's West High School, on the south bluff overlooking Westchester Lagoon.

Polar bears diverged into a separate species between four and five million years ago, but interbred with their brown bear cousins and declined in population in response to climate warming over the millennia, according to a new study that included many animals from Alaska.

Wide-ranging estimates of up to 12 deaths and up to 30 cancers in Alaska and other U.S. states could be traced back to the Fukushima Daiichi disaster.

American genome: Common ancestry links North and South American natives, suggesting that a homogenous population immigrated in three waves over Bering Strait land bridge linking Eurasia and Americas.

The study proves aurora sounds aren’t illusions or hallucinations. They aren’t coming from the tips of the trees, emerging from frost or ice, or rumbling up out of the Earth itself.

A note from a summer family kayak adventure in Prince William Sound: There will be bugs.

Imagine Alaska as a much warmer climate, with spruce and pine growing on the Arctic's shores. New evidence points to "astonishing" periods of extreme warming in the not-so-distant polar past.

Despite a frigid, snowy Alaska winter, the Arctic Ocean's cover of sea ice melted back quickly during the first two weeks of June. It now covers the smallest extent ever observed for this time of year, say monitors.

New archaeological data from Alaska suggests ancient North America's first human inhabitants may have been following the sea coast instead of land-based herd animals, casting further doubt on current mainstream theory.

For the first five months of 2012, Alaska temperatures were 3.2 degrees F below average, making it the 15th coolest January-May period on record.

No one event ended the mammoths, researchers say. Rather, a coalescence of climate change and habitat change -- along with human predators -- triggered it.

Patches of the Eurasian Arctic prairie has been transformed by an arboreal facelift, prompted by rising summer temperatures and happening much faster than scientists ever thought possible.

If ice continues to decline, scientists speculate these phytoplankton blooms may become more common or appear earlier in the year in Arctic.

There was more ice in the Bering Sea last month than during any other May observed over the past 32 years of satellite monitoring.

Bore tides are nature's true "tidal waves" and Alaska's Turnagain Arm is the only U.S. locale where bores strike with regularity, though they occasionally churn up Knik Arm, too.