Satellite image of fall colors blanketing Kodiak Island caught on October 3, 2023, by the Operational Land Imager-2 on Landsat 9.
The Alaskan tundra puts on a short lived screen of color before the snows fall and bears hibernate.
As summer season turns to fall in Alaska, days of plentiful sunlight pave the way to quickly trespassing darkness. Bears plump up for hibernation, while tundra plants solidify themselves for the long, cold winter season. Humans pleasure in all of this elegance, much of it from afar: watching brown bears capture salmon out of the river and turn into rotund beasts, and– if the clouds clear– catching a peek from area of autumn reds and golds.
Landsat 9s OLI-2 (Operational Land Imager-2) captured this picture of fall colors blanketing Kodiak Island, the second-largest island in the United States and home of Kodiak National Wildlife Refuge, on October 3, 2023. The islands terrain ranges from rugged coastline to spruce forest to snowy peaks. The southwestern part of Kodiak along the Shelikof Strait, shown here, is colder and drier than the maritime eastern side, and a tundra community predominates.
Landsat 9s OLI-2 (Operational Land Imager-2) captured this image of fall colors blanketing Kodiak Island, the second-largest island in the United States and home of Kodiak National Wildlife Refuge, on October 3, 2023. Fall colors on the tundra are on display in the image (above), taken in September 2015 at the north end of Frazer Lake in Kodiak National Wildlife Refuge. Not to be outshined, an estimated 3,500 Kodiak brown bears (Ursus arctos middendorffi) stroll the mountains, forests, and tundra on the islands of the Kodiak Archipelago. Kodiak brown bears can weigh twice as much as interior brown bears, much better understood as grizzlies.
The plant life on this part of Kodiak Island includes sedges, heaths, mosses, and grasses. Trees are normally missing, save for the occasional Sitka spruce. Wet peatlands fill out the bottoms of the valleys.
Photo taken on September 12, 2015, showing fall colors on the tundra at the north end of Frazer Lake in Kodiak National Wildlife Refuge.
Fall colors on the tundra are on screen in the photo (above), taken in September 2015 at the north end of Frazer Lake in Kodiak National Wildlife Refuge. Sunlight levels, snow conditions, and temperature level are some of the aspects believed to affect when tundra plants lose chlorophyll and reabsorb nutrients each year.
Across the Shelikof Strait, bears preparing for hibernation in Katmai National Park (northwest of this image) hung around in the spotlight throughout the yearly Fat Bear Week competitors. (In 2023, Chunk and Grazer squared off in the finals.) Not to be outshined, an approximated 3,500 Kodiak brown bears (Ursus arctos middendorffi) roam the mountains, forests, and tundra on the islands of the Kodiak Archipelago. Kodiak brown bears can weigh two times as much as interior brown bears, much better referred to as grizzlies. Females can reach 700 pounds (320 kgs), and males can top out at 1,400 pounds (640 kilograms).
On Kodiak, the bears have access to a bounty of food sources, foraging amongst the salmonberry and elderberry patches and fishing in the streams. The Karluk River, for instance, boasts one of the most well-known sockeye salmon runs in Alaska, with the fish sometimes numbering in the millions. The river also supports a native stock of Chinook salmon and populations of numerous other salmon and trout types.
NASA Earth Observatory image by Wanmei Liang, utilizing Landsat data from the U.S. Geological Survey. Photo by Lisa Hupp, courtesy of the Alaska Region U.S. Fish & & Wildlife Service.