The vehicle got stuck on rocks in the Pass. /Courtesy: UDPS

A man was arrested on charges of stealing a car and crashing it while intoxicated Tuesday night on Overland Drive.

Deputy police chief Mike Holman says they got the call about a crash in the Pass, above Summer Bay Lake, from a person who'd driven by. 

When they got there around 7 p.m., officers found a Subaru Outback that had been reported missing from the high school parking lot that afternoon. The driver, 33-year-old Adam Shapsnikoff, was still behind the wheel.

The United Nations is on the verge of passing a new set of maritime laws for the Arctic, ahead of a projected increase in shipping traffic across the North Pole.

The new laws are called the Polar Code, and they come from the U.N.’s International Maritime Organization. This week in London, the IMO will vote on half of the new policy. It includes protections for Arctic marine mammals.

Courtesy: City of Unalaska

Residents can hear the latest plans for cleaning up the Unalaska Lake watershed and weigh in again at a public meeting tonight.

Engineers and city officials heard hours of public comment at the city’s first forum on the project back in October. Since then, they’ve taken a closer look at how to improve salmon spawning grounds in watershed -- factoring in residents’ ideas and their million-dollar budget constraint.

In this illustration of ocean currents, white dots indicate where no cesium-134 was detected. Blue dots indicate locations were low levels of cesium-134 were detected farther offshore. /Courtesy: WHOI

Coastal Alaskans have been watching for signs of radiation from 2011’s Fukushima nuclear plant accident in Japan. Now, an oceanography institute says trace amounts have been detected off the West Coast. Radiation experts say the very low levels of measured do not pose a health threat here.

The post-earthquake and tsunami nuke plant accident spilled a large amount of radioactive contamination into the Pacific three years ago.

Courtesy of UniSea

The president of Unalaska's biggest processing company has passed away. Terry Shaff, 67, died this weekend shortly after he began treatment for pancreatic cancer.

Shaff served as UniSea's top executive for 16 years. But his first job at the company was on the ground in Unalaska. When Shaff arrived in the early 1990s, the company was still breaking down fish on a barge.

"It just started out as almost like a remote fish camp and [he] built it right up into a city," says Chris Plaisance, UniSea's corporate human resources director. 

Newly discovered Yaya, bound in sea ice, is shown in this NASA image from June 2013. /Credit: NASA/Cryopolitics

Russia has been ramping up its military presence in the Siberian Arctic this fall. And they’ve had to do so around a new point on the map: a small island, discovered just south of the Northern Sea Route.

The speck of land was first spotted last year, by two helicopter pilots flying equipment north to the New Siberian Islands. The even newer island is known as Yaya -- the Russian word for I, repeated twice. That’s as in two pilots saying “I found it first,” according to Arctic news blog Cryopolitics.

The bulk carrier Mykonos Seas in Vancouver earlier this month. /Credit: M.L. Jacobs

The Coast Guard medevacked a mariner near Cold Bay on Sunday after he injured his hand in machinery aboard his vessel.

The man was hoisted off the 623-foot cargo ship Mykonos Seas. It’s a Liberian vessel that was about 75 miles southeast of Cold Bay.

The Coast Guard sent its Jayhawk helicopter, forward-deployed in Cold Bay for the winter fishing season, to conduct the rescue. They flew the injured man to the Cold Bay clinic, where he went onto Anchorage via commercial medevac for further treatment. He's reportedly in stable condition.

An infrared image showing high temperatures on Pavlof Volcano's northwest flank, indicating lava flows. /Credit: Dave Schneider/AVO

After a day of intense eruption on the Alaska Peninsula, Pavlof Volcano has suddenly gone quiet.

Pavlof stopped putting out ash on Saturday evening, according to the Alaska Volcano Observatory. Warnings for pilots to fly around the ash plume -- more than 35,000 feet high at its peak -- were canceled shortly after.

Since then, the AVO’s Dave Schneider says the ash has been dissipating over the Bering Sea. He says it’s pretty typical for a volcano to pause mid-eruption.

On Saturday, Pavlof's ash plume was at least 35,000 feet high, blowing for 250 miles out over the Bering Sea. /Credit: Dave Schneider/AVO

Update, 4 p.m. Saturday: Pavlof Volcano's ash plume has more than tripled in height since the eruption began -- and it's starting to affect air travel.

The Alaska Volcano Observatory is reporting ash at least 35,000 feet high, blowing for more than 250 miles out to sea from the volcano. That's prompted the Federal Aviation Administration to put trans-Pacific flights on watch.

Pilots have been asked to keep an eye out for ash near their flightpaths. They'll have to fly over it, or seek alternate routes to the south of the plume if they can't.