The Arctic National Wildlife Refuge or Arctic Refuge is a national wildlife refuge in northeastern Alaska, United States, on traditional Iñupiaq and Gwich'in lands. The refuge is 19,286,722 acres (78,050.59 km2) of the Alaska North Slope region, with a northern coastline and vast inland forest, taiga, and tundra regions. ANWR is the largest national wildlife refuge in the country, slightly larger than the Yukon Delta National Wildlife Refuge. The refuge is administered from offices in Fairbanks. ANWR is home to a diverse range of endemic mammal species; notably, it is one of the few North American locations with all three endemic American ursids—the polar bear, grizzly bear, and American black bear, each of which resides predominantly in its own ecological niche. Besides the bears, other mammal species include the moose, caribou, wolves, red and Arctic fox, Canada lynx, wolverine, pine marten, American beaver, and North American river otter. Further inland, mountain goats may be seen near the slope. Hundreds of species of migratory birds visit the refuge yearly, and it is a vital, protected breeding location for them. Snow geese, eiders and snowy owls may be observed as well.
Nuiqsut is a city in North Slope Borough, Alaska, United States. The population was 512 at the 2020 Census and 92.5% Alaska Native. It is located in the midst of a vast quantity of oil reserves and the closest community to ConocoPhillips oil drilling project named Willow Project in the Alpine, Alaska oil field of the National Petroleum Reserve–Alaska. It owns the surface rights, but not the subsurface rights of the Alpine field, which are with the regional Arctic Slope Regional Corporation.
The Iñupiat are a group of Alaska Natives whose traditional territory roughly spans northeast from Norton Sound on the Bering Sea to the northernmost part of the Canada–United States border. Their current communities include 34 villages across Iñupiat Nunaat, including seven Alaskan villages in the North Slope Borough, affiliated with the Arctic Slope Regional Corporation; eleven villages in Northwest Arctic Borough; and sixteen villages affiliated with the Bering Straits Regional Corporation. They often claim to be the first people of the Kauwerak.
The Alaska North Slope is the region of the U.S. state of Alaska located on the northern slope of the Brooks Range along the coast of two marginal seas of the Arctic Ocean, the Chukchi Sea being on the western side of Point Barrow, and the Beaufort Sea on the eastern. With the exception of the highway connecting Fairbanks to Prudhoe Bay, the region is disconnected from the rest of the Alaskan road system and relies mostly on waterways and small airports for transportation due to the Brooks Range secluding the region from the rest of the state.
Margaret Astrid Lindholm Ogden, known by her pen names Robin Hobb and Megan Lindholm, is an American writer of speculative fiction. As Hobb, she is best known for her fantasy novels set in the Realm of the Elderlings, which comprise the Farseer, Liveship Traders and Tawny Man trilogies, the Rain WildChronicles, and the Fitz and the Fool trilogy. Lindholm's writing includes the urban fantasy novel Wizard of the Pigeons and science fiction short stories, among other works. As of 2018, her fiction has been translated into 22 languages and sold more than 4 million copies.
The Gwichʼin are an Athabaskan-speaking First Nations people of Canada and an Alaska Native people. They live in the northwestern part of North America, mostly north of the Arctic Circle.
Caitlin Maura Hanrahan is a Canadian author and academic.
The question of whether to drill for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) has been an ongoing political controversy in the United States since 1977. As of 2017, Republicans have attempted to allow drilling in ANWR almost fifty times, finally being successful with the passage of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017.
Decipher is a speculative fiction novel by Stel Pavlou (1970–present), published in 2001 in England by Simon & Schuster and 2002 in the United States by St. Martin's Press. It is published in many languages with some significant title changes. The Italian and Russian editions have the title Il codice di Atlantide, while the German edition is called Code Zero. The novel is about a fictional linguist, Richard Scott, and an assembled team of specialists who are in a race against time to crack a code found on ancient monuments around the world before an impending cataclysm predicted in mythology can strike. The story centers on the ancient city of Atlantis and features other mythical sites such as the Hall of Records.
Daniel H. Wilson is a New York Times bestselling author, television host and robotics engineer. He currently resides in Portland, Oregon. His books include the award-winning humor titles How to Survive a Robot Uprising, Where's My Jetpack? and How to Build a Robot Army and the bestseller Robopocalypse.
The National Petroleum Reserve in Alaska (NPRA) is an area of land on the Alaska North Slope owned by the United States federal government and managed by the Department of the Interior, Bureau of Land Management (BLM). It lies to the west of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, which, as a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service managed National Wildlife Refuge, is also federal land.
Exploration for petroleum in the Arctic is expensive and challenging both technically and logistically. In the offshore, sea ice can be a major factor. There have been many discoveries of oil and gas in the several Arctic basins that have seen extensive exploration over past decades but distance from existing infrastructure has often deterred development. Development and production operations in the Arctic offshore as a result of exploration have been limited, with the exception of the Barents and Norwegian seas. In Alaska, exploration subsequent to the discovery of the Prudhoe Bay oilfield has focussed on the onshore and shallow coastal waters.
The Alaska Wilderness League (AWL) is a nonprofit organization that works to protect Alaska's most significant wild lands from oil and gas drilling and from other industrial threats. Founded in 1993, AWL has its main office in Washington, DC, with additional offices in Anchorage and Juneau, Alaska.
The United States offshore drilling debate is an ongoing debate in the United States about whether, the extent to which, in which areas, and under what conditions, further offshore drilling should be allowed in U.S.-administered waters.
Sharon Louise Gleason is an American lawyer and jurist who serves as the Chief United States district judge of the United States District Court for the District of Alaska. Appointed by President Barack Obama in 2012, Gleason is the first woman to serve as a federal judge in the District of Alaska. She was previously a state court judge on the Alaska Superior Court from 2001 to 2012.
Arctic Challenger is a barge which has been converted by Superior Energy Services for use in the Arctic drilling operations of Shell Oil Company. This barge is designed to function as a "novel engineering solution" which they refer to as an Arctic Containment System to respond should a blowout event occur at drilling sites in the Beaufort or Chukchi Seas. According to testimony provided to Senator Mark Begich on 11 October 2012, Coast Guard Rear Admiral Thomas Ostebo said the certification for the Shell spill barge Arctic Challenger to operate in Alaska was given on the 10th of October at the Bellingham, Washington shipyard where it was constructed. Ostebo is commander of the Coast Guard's 17th district, which covers Alaska.
Kulluk was an ice-strengthened drill barge that was used for oil exploration in the Arctic waters. She was constructed by Mitsui Engineering & Shipbuilding in Japan in 1983 and operated in the Canadian Arctic until 1993 when she was mothballed for over a decade. In 2005, she was purchased and extensively refurbished by Royal Dutch Shell for drilling off the Alaska North Slope.
Climate change in Alaska encompasses the effects of climate change in the U.S. state of Alaska.
Protests against Arctic drilling began in Seattle in 2015 in response to the news that the Port of Seattle authority made an agreement with Royal Dutch Shell to berth offshore drillships and semi-submersibles at the Port's Terminal 5 (T5) during the off-season of oil exploration in Alaskan waters of the Arctic. Hundreds of protesters took to Elliott Bay in kayaks, rafts, and other small boats, both as a demonstration and to interrupt docking of Shell's Polar Pioneer semi-submersible drilling vessel at Terminal 5. The waterborne demonstrators were dubbed kayaktivists by social and news media.
Tagiuk Provider, formerly Arctic Endeavor, is a 205 ft (62 m) 1500-ton ice-class flat-topped deck cargo barge adapted to being a clam-shell crane scoop mining platform for placer gold mining in the Bering Sea off Nome, Alaska, United States. The barge, a gold dredge, is owned by Tagiuk Gold, which previously ran scuba-diver-operated suction dredges for seafloor gold mining in the area. Tagiuk Gold is run by miner Andrew Lee, whose business running the barge is partially crowdfunded. Tagiuk Provider was profiled in an episode of Bering Sea Gold, at which time, it was the largest scoop dredge operating off Nome.
