Alaska Science Forum: Thirty years of writing about Alaska science

When I was drinking coffee with a cab-driving-author friend of the same vintage last week, he said of my occupation: “It’s the best job in Alaska.”

After a few seconds of pondering, I nodded.

It has been 11,000 days since Oct. 25, 1994. That’s when I wrote my first story, a Halloween-themed piece on little brown bats, for the Alaska Science Forum.

The science forum is a weekly story we here at the University of Alaska Fairbanks Geophysical Institute send out to Alaska news outlets and 358 email subscribers each week. Established in the late 1940s, the Geophysical Institute is a place where a few dozen researchers study the aurora, earthquakes, permafrost, glaciers, the atmosphere, snow, coastal erosion, sea ice and other northern phenomena.

The public relations soft-sell known as the Alaska Science Forum predates my arrival by a long shot. In 1976, Geophysical Institute researcher Neil Davis — who among his many other accomplishments helped Poker Flat Research Range rise from the boreal forest north of Fairbanks — sat down and listened to UAF history professor Claus-M. Naske. Naske spoke of a “growing gap between progress in the sciences and what the public knew about science,” wrote my predecessor Carla Helfferich.

Davis typed out the first Alaska Science Forum story — about the viability of expanding Fairbanks southward across the Tanana River — in February 1976. Editors for the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner published it, as they have done each Sunday for the past 49 years.

When I finished seasonal work as a park ranger in fall 1994, I answered a want ad in that same newspaper for the job I have today.

I replaced the retiring Helfferich, whose pieces made me feel smarter for having read them. She, who was then starting her own publishing house, had taken over writing the weekly piece from Sue Ann Bowling. Bowling was a meteorologist and one of the first woman scientists at the Geophysical Institute.

For most of the Alaska Science Forum’s unique existence, the directors of the institute (currently Bob McCoy) have footed the bill for paying the writer. In doing so, they have given news outlets — print and digital — free content that has been vetted by researchers. (Scientists have corrected these stories for years, saving us from a boatload of errors and improving my grammar.)

Those institute leaders and my bosses have enabled me to keep on writing — about 1,500 stories and counting — through an era when newspapers disappeared en masse due to lost advertising revenue.

I didn’t see the digital era coming when I walked out of my final UAF journalism class in the Bunnell Building. Now I realize how lucky I was to answer that classified ad; it led to an abnormally stable writing job.

Because of my need to get outside and curiosity at what’s around the hill, I made this job into something different than the previous writers of the column.

My favorite weeks are the ones I travel with scientists to explore somewhere I haven’t been before. I can dig holes or carry batteries for them, while also guaranteeing that a story about their work will appear in some form of Alaska media.

Last week, I counted 86 field trips on which I accompanied scientists during the last three decades. These men and women have offered me seats in trucks, float planes, snowmachines and research ships I never could have afforded as an independent traveler. Some would argue that taints the integrity of the product. It’s a valid point, but I would make the same choices again to stand near the top of Denali, to sit on the flat rocks of a Japanese Shinto shrine while overlooking the hills of Kiska, and to smell the sulphur air wafting from Mount Katmai’s caldera.

This seems like a retirement story, but I haven’t filled out that paperwork yet. I am instead tooting my own horn for a few reasons: One, my deadline is approaching and I got nothin’. Two, I am giving a public lecture next week.

As the first speaker for the Geophysical Institute’s annual Science for Alaska talk series (which has been around longer than I have), I will present “Aleutians to Arctic Coast: Covering Alaska Science for 30 Years” on Tuesday, Feb. 4, 2025, at 7 p.m. in UAF’s Schaible Auditorium. Also on Zoom or Facebook Live. More information is at gi.alaska.edu.

• Since the late 1970s, the University of Alaska Fairbanks’ Geophysical Institute has provided this column free in cooperation with the UAF research community. Ned Rozell ned.rozell@alaska.edu is a science writer for the Geophysical Institute.