Ned Rozell
Ned Rozell is a science writer for the Geophysical Institute. He has been a freelance writer for the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner, the Anchorage Daily News, Mushing magazine, The Kenai Peninsula Clarion and others.
In addition to his writing skills, Ned has experience in the great outdoors. During the summers of 1993 and 1994 he was a back country ranger for the National park Service in the Yukon-Charley Rivers National Preserve, a 100-mile buffer zone around the Yukon and Charley Rivers between Eagle and Circle, Alaska. He has worked for the State of Alaska as a wildlands firefighter. After the Exxon Valdez oil spill, he worked for Veco as an oil recovery technician.
Ned earned a B.A. in journalism from the University of Alaska Fairbanks in 1990.
A Yearly Flood Into The Gulf Of Alaska
Digging Up Augustine’s Top-Heavy Legacy
Augustine Volcano sits alone, a 4,000-foot pyramid on its own island in Cook Inlet. Like many volcanoes, it has a tendency to become top heavy. When gravity acts on Augustine's oversteepened dome, rockslides spill into the ocean. A scientist recently found new evidence for an Augustine-generated tsunami from a time when Egyptian pharaohs built their own pyramids.
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Tsunami Survivor Shares Her Story
On April 1, 1946, the sea floor ruptured just south of Unimak Island in the Aleutian Islands. Seawater displaced by the giant earthquake sent a 100-foot wave into the Scotch Cape lighthouse on Unimak, destroying the concrete structure and killing the five men inside. They never knew what hit them in the 2 a.m. darkness.
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Twenty Weeks Through The Heart Of Alaska
It is a very remarkable fact that a region under a civilized government for more than a century should remain so completely unknown as the vast territory drained by the Copper, Tanana and Koyukuk Rivers.
Northern Lab Cranked Out The Quirky And Creative
Scientists who worked for the Arctic Aeromedical Laboratory from the late 1940s to the 1960s cranked out dozens of quirky and sometimes controversial publications in its two decades of existence. Developed during the Cold War to "solve the severe environmental problems of men living and working in the Arctic."
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Why Was Interior Alaska Green During The Last Ice Age?
During our planet's most recent cold period, a slab of ice smothered Manhattan. Canada looked like Antarctica but with no protruding mountains. When the last glacial maximum peaked about 20,000 years ago, most of the continent — from the Arctic Ocean to the Missouri River — slept under a blanket of white. 
A “Totally Weird” Dinosaur
A couple of summers ago, David Tomeo was exploring a creekbed in Denali National Park, preparing for a field seminar on the park’s dinosaurs he would help lead a few weeks later.
With a trained eye for the impressions dinosaurs pressed into mud millions of years ago, Tomeo walked to a large boulder in the middle of a landslide. Right in the center of it, a four-toed track stood out.
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Glaciologists Help with Recovery of Human Remains
In June 2012, Army Air National Guard pilots flying over the glacier in a Blackhawk helicopter saw aircraft parts on the dirty, cracked-up ice.
It’s not often that glaciologists help with the recovery of long-lost human remains, but military officials recently enlisted Martin Truffer for that purpose
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Impressions of a Place Far Away from Everywhere
I’m resting on a mattress of tundra plants that are growing more than 200 miles from the nearest Alaska village.
While I have snuck away here to my own private ridge top, eight other people, all scientists, are somewhere on this 30-mile-long wedge of tundra, rocky beaches, lakes and bird cliffs in the central Bering Sea.
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Moose Flies a High-Summer Alaska Pest
These creatures are stout enough to absorb the smack of a palm and then fly away.
With evolved stealth, they feather-land on hairless skin. Soon after, the victim feels the pierce of a needle many times worse than a mosquito bite.
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Dinosaurs in the Wrangell Mountains
The more Tony Fiorillo explores Alaska, the more dinosaur tracks he finds on its lonely ridgetops.
The latest examples are the stone footprints of two different dinosaurs near the tiny settlement of Chisana in the Wrangell Mountains.
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100 Years Since the Big One
On June 6, 1912, if you happened to be sitting on a log outside your cabin near Fairbanks, Juneau or Dawson City, you would have heard an explosion.
There was no way to know the boom came from hundreds of miles away, or that it was the starting gun for the largest volcanic eruption of the 1900s.
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Twenty feet of snow on Valdez Glacier
After a winter of outstanding snow conditions, three scientists drove snowmachines up Valdez Glacier this spring, curious to see how far they could get.
At about 5,500 feet above the salt water of Port Valdez, their machines rested on about 20 feet of snow that had fallen there during the winter.
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Snow Mosquitoes: The First Wave of Summer Irritants
First, I’ll wear light-colored clothing. Second, I’ll bathe more often in an attempt to be as odorless as possible. Third, I won't exhale while I'm in the woods.
"Snow mosquitoes," the big, sluggish mosquitoes that are the first to irritate us, survive the winter by bundling up in leaf litter or wedging themselves under loose tree bark.
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The Alaska Porcupine’s Winter in Slow-motion
While running through Bicentennial Park in Anchorage, biologist Jessy Coltrane spotted a porcupine in a birch tree. On her runs on days following, she saw it again and again, in good weather and bad. Over time, she knew which Alaska creature she wanted to study.
“I thought, ‘Oh my god, how does he do it? How does this animal make it through winter?’” Coltrane said during the December defense of her doctoral thesis in Fairbanks.
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Discovering a New Dinosaur in Northern Alaska
There's a new kind of dinosaur out there, and it lived in Alaska.
Its bones, long turned to stone, are part of a cliff in northern Alaska. That's where dinosaur-hunter Tony Fiorillo brushed dirt away from a portion of its massive skull something that most of us would mistake for a rock.
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The Freezing of Alaska
Beneath a sky of stars and hazy aurora, the heat of an October day shimmers upward. The next morning, leaves, moss and tundra plants are woven into a carpet of white frost; a skin of ice creeps over the surface of lakes. Alaska is freezing once again, responding to the planet’s nod away from the sun and signaling one of the biggest changes of the year.
Northern plants in these parts are standing at the ready, prepared for a long season of doing nothing.
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Lone Wolf Goes the Distance
Somewhere in the rolling tundra east of Deadhorse, a lone wolf hunts. The 100-pound male will take anything it can catch, or find — a ptarmigan, a darting tundra rodent, a fish, the scraps of a carcass, or, if lucky, a moose calf or caribou. Hunger is a common companion, but the wolf somehow survived when his mate probably died of it last winter.
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Sea Ice Study Goes Beyond the Numbers
In places where the air gets cold enough to freeze seawater, sea ice creates a world known by few people a shifting, ephemeral, both jagged and smooth platform of white that clings to the shore for much of the year.
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