Streams in Alaska are turning orange with iron and sulfuric acid. Scientists are trying to figure out why
Scientific American
BY ALEC LUHN
January 1st, 2024
“It was a cloudy July afternoon in Alaska's Kobuk Valley National Park, part of the biggest stretch of protected wilderness in the U.S. We were 95 kilometers (60 miles) from the nearest village and 400 kilometers from the road system. Nature doesn't get any more unspoiled. But the stream flowing past our feet looked polluted. The streambed was orange, as if the rocks had been stained with carrot juice. The surface glistened with a gasoline like rainbow sheen. “This is bad stuff,” said Patrick Sullivan, an ecologist at the University of Alaska Anchorage.”
“….Less than a dozen meters away the stream flowed into the Salmon River, a ribbon of swift channels and shimmering rapids that winds south from the snow-dimpled dun peaks of the Brooks Range. This is the last frontier in the state known as “the last frontier,” a 1,000-kilometer line of pyramidlike slopes that wall off the northern portion of Alaska from the gray, wind-raked Arctic Coast.
“Now, however, the Salmon is quite literally rusting.”