Oceans

The processor was abandoned in September following a disastrous fishing season in Bristol Bay where the ship’s owner went broke, the crew went unpaid, and it’s 158,000 pound haul of salmon was declared unfit for human consumption.

Still melting – and melting fast. That’s the basic take-away from the federal government’s annual Arctic Report Card. It finds that Arctic ocean temperatures are increasing and sea ice is declining at the fastest rate in at least 1500 years.

A group of marine scientists visited Western Alaska recently to discuss the results of a second bottom-trawl survey of the northern Bering Sea. This round of research comes seven years after their first survey of the area in 2010. 

According to the McDowell Group’s 2017 fall sockeye market analysis, in 2016, “only 34 percent of Alaska sockeye production went to Japanese or canned markets.” As outlined in the same analysis, the seafood industry struggled across the board in the early 2000s.

Almost 70 mushers signed up for the 2018 Iditarod sled dog race by the registration deadline on Friday.

Two incidents involving Alaska-bound fuel barges transiting the Inside Passage in 13 months has renewed outcry over the hazards of shipping refined petroleum products through the narrow straits of the Inside Passage. Southeast Alaska’s fuel supply mostly runs through Canada’s territorial waters.