News

FILL AREA — Phil Welker, of GeoEngineers, explains how monitoring efforts led to the plan to cover about one acre of contaminated ground with fill to prevent erosion.

Contaminated former gold house site to be capped this month

By Megan Gannon Later this month, Nomeites can expect to see a work crew moving fill over a 1-acre area near Dry Creek. NovaGold, which inherited the site of the former Alaska Gold processing...

Elections: Only few declare candidacy to run for office

By Diana Haecker The filing deadline to declare candidacy for municipal office ended on Tuesday, August 30 at 5 p.m. and keeping with a trend over the past years, the appetite to run for city...

POINT SPENCER— The former Coast Guard site at Point Spencer is one of the port sites that figure prominently in the Arctic Commitment Act.

Arctic Commitment Act surprised region

By Peter Loewi More than three weeks have passed since U.S. Senator Lisa Murkowski introduced the Arctic Commitment Act to Congress, but the communities of the region, which feature prominently in...

Nome hears potential for small-scale nuclear energy

By Peter Loewi Just two weeks after the topic of Nome being powered by a micro-nuclear reactor came up during a meeting with the Governor, Associate Vice Chancellor of Research at the University of...

NOAA administrator visits Nome

By Peter Loewi “I tell people that our agency is here to save the world, and I mean it,” Dr. Rick Spinrad said. The Administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration visited Nome...

Researchers find even higher algal levels in regional waters

By Diana HaeckerAfter alerting the region to very high levels of harmful algal blooms west of Kotzebue and Gambell two weeks ago, scientist onboard the research vessel Norseman II have found even...

Region has 27 active COVID cases

By Peter Loewi Following last week’s announcement that the United Kingdom had approved Moderna’s “bivalent” COVID vaccine which partially targets the wildtype of the virus and partially targets the...

U.S. Army Corps wants IPOP litigation moved to Alaska

By Megan Gannon The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has requested that its legal dispute with IPOP play out in an Alaska federal court. The Nevada-based outfit IPOP seeks to dredge for gold in the...

NSHC counters monkeypox misinformation

By Peter Loewi Despite continuing to see “a smattering of cases” across the region, as Norton Sound Health Corporation’s Medical Director Dr. Mark Peterson called it, last week’s COVID-19 tribal...

LOCAL RESPONSE— NSHC Office of Environmental Health coordiator Emma Pete analyzes a water sample taken on Tuesday, Aug. 16 at Cape Nome for signs of algal organisms.

Researchers find high concentrations of harmful algae in regional waters

By Diana Haecker Researchers stepping off the research vessel Norseman II in Nome last weekend, brought significant news of having found very high concentrations of a phytoplankton called...