by Julia Ditto It was the first of July, and the thirty-first day in the Brooks Range for our team of five. The crew was led by Dr. Roman Dial, a professor and biologist at Alaska Pacific University. The three others and I were all undergraduates. Russel Wong, our mathematician, Duncan Wright, our musician, and I, the artist, were all students from APU. Ben Weissenbach, our writer and fourth undergraduate, was from Princeton University on an assignment to write an article about our adventurous scientific expedition. Little did we know, the next few hours were about to be the most adventurous of our entire six-week expedition. We departed camp as…
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The Village
by Julia Ditto On my return trip from the Brooks Range, while traveling through Arctic Village, Alaska, I witnessed the arrival of the mail plane. Such an event could be seen as mundane in the average twenty-first century society; for me it was anything but. It was July 12, the last morning of a 42-day expedition for our group of four undergrads. Our remote experience in the Brooks Range contrasted with the sudden commotion at the Arctic Village airstrip. It is a memory that will never leave me. “Alaska isn’t one place. It’s many places. You can’t really see all of Alaska,” our pilot Kirk Sweetser said, his voice cutting…
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Eliminating Plastic Waste by Creating a Circular Plastic Economy
by Max Brown Plastic is undoubtedly the most widely used material on the planet, finding its way into practically every consumer product. In tandem with this global use is global pollution, and the problems of plastic pollution have risen to the forefront of issues facing humanity. Plastics are durable products, with an estimated lifespan of hundreds of thousands of years, translating into a worldwide issue of massive waste that poses an incomprehensible threat to the environment (Xanthos & Walker, 2017). It is estimated that by 2025, there will be one ton of ocean plastic for every three tons of fish (Forrest, Giacovazzi, Dunlop, Reisser, & Tickler, 2019). Additionally, the plastic…
