Author: alaskaadmin

The Alaska Volcano Observatory has raised the caution level at Kupreanof Volcano on the Alaska Peninsula, a normally quiet peak that hasn’t had a major eruption in almost 570,000 years.

“It’s a typical Alaska volcano. It’s not dormant by any means,” said Matt Haney, the U.S. Geological Survey Scientist-in-Charge at the observatory.

On Tuesday, the observatory issued an advisory notice saying that it had detected a rising number of earthquakes and sulfur dioxide emissions at the peak.

“This activity is likely caused by a magmatic intrusion beneath the volcano,” the observatory said in the notice.

“It’s been a classic volcanic unrest sequence … From the science point of view, it’s been very fascinating to see unrest develop at Kupreanof,” Haney said.

Rising unrest does not mean an eruption will happen or is even likely to happen. Last summer, Mount Spurr near Anchorage showed a rising level of activity that appeared to indicate a likely eruption. Despite those signs, no eruption took place and seismic activity has since declined.

A 6,217-foot peak, Kupreanof is in a particularly remote part of the Alaska Peninsula National Wildlife Refuge, 505 miles southwest of Anchorage. The closest permanently inhabited community is Perryville, 26 miles to the southeast.

Though isolated, Kupreanof — like most of Alaska’s volcanoes — is near trans-Pacific flight routes, and a sufficiently large eruption could disrupt cargo and passenger flights between North American airports and Asia. 

Haney said by phone on Thursday that the observatory detected an escalating string of earthquakes beneath the volcano starting in February and continuing through this week.

On Wednesday, instruments recorded the largest earthquake yet, measured variously at Magnitude 3.5 and 3.0.

Satellites have also measured rising concentrations of sulfur dioxide near Kupreanof. That gas is a standard sign of magma moving near the surface of the Earth.

“It’s not just one of our monitoring data streams that’s showing (activity) above our background levels. Now it’s seismicity and gas. When we have two of our data streams, that’s really making the diagnosis with higher confidence that there has been a magma intrusion beneath Kupreanof,” Haney said.

There are no historic records of a confirmed eruption at Kupreanof. In 2015, a mariner reported “black smoke northwest of Ivanof Bay,” likely from Kupreanof, and in 1987, a pilot reported what may have been a small eruption.

“Although reports from Kupreanof are uncommon, steaming from Kupreanof has been noted for at least the last 75 years,” the observatory notes in its description of the 2015 report. 

The last confirmed eruption was about 570,000 years ago. 

As a result, the volcano has no permanent monitoring network. 

Hannah Dietterich, a research geophysicist at the observatory, said on Wednesday that she and others at the observatory have begun arranging more regular satellite measurements, including with instruments designed to measure whether the ground around the volcano is bulging upward.

Satellite images taken this week show Kupreanof still covered in a thick layer of ice and snow, indicating that the peak has not warmed to the point of melting that accumulation.

Haney said that in addition to satellite measurements, the observatory may use a helicopter to take a “quick-deploy” monitoring station to the volcano in July, during a previously scheduled trip to another nearby peak.

SUBSCRIBE: GET THE MORNING HEADLINES DELIVERED TO YOUR INBOX.

This article was originally published by The 19th, a nonprofit newsroom covering gender, politics, and policy.

After briefly letting a national ban take effect, the Supreme Court blocked a lower court’s ruling that would have prevented mailing a key abortion drug.

The decision, issued Thursday, allows telehealth dispensation of mifepristone, one of two drugs used in most abortions, to continue while the state of Louisiana challenges its legality.

Research shows the two-drug regimen of mifepristone and misoprostol is safe to take from home and highly effective in ending a pregnancy. The drug’s safety profile led the Food and Drug Administration to approve mifepristone for distribution without an in-person doctors’ visit in 2023, after the agency allowed medical professionals to do so during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Mailed prescriptions have allowed people living in states with bans to continue getting abortions, contributing to an increase in abortions since the fall of Roe v. Wade. Now, about a quarter of all abortions are done through telehealth, and about half are for people living in states with bans. Data released Monday by the Society for Family Planning, which tracks abortions, noted that even in states without abortion bans, about 40 percent of people getting abortions use telehealth.

Medical providers hailed the court’s decision, but argued that the legal back-and-forth could confuse patients seeking abortions and clinicians who provide them.

“Though today’s decision means that mifepristone remains available through telehealth for now, this fight is not over,” Dr. Camille A. Clare, the head of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, said in a statement. “The chaos and confusion wrought by competing decisions and the revocation and restoration of access on an almost daily basis do real harm to patients and to the clinicians who care for them.”

Telehealth’s popularity has put abortion opponents on a quest to block the option through a variety of legal challenges and state laws.

The court’s decision comes in response to a case filed by Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill who argued that the FDA had insufficiently considered mifepristone’s safety when approving it for telehealth. The state also alleged that the drug’s availability by telehealth had enabled a woman in Louisiana to be forced into an abortion against her will. Abortion opponents have argued often that telehealth has made it easier to force people to get abortions, though research suggests that more often, reproductive coercion involves people being denied the option to terminate a pregnancy.

On May 1, the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals blocked mifepristone’s approval for telehealth while the case continued, arguing that Louisiana was likely to succeed. Drug manufacturers appealed to the Supreme Court, which on May 4 temporarily blocked the lower court’s ruling while it considered the case.

The court’s decision blocking the ruling briefly expired at 5 p.m. ET on Thursday, May 14. The court ruled almost half an hour later to enable telehealth to continue.

The Louisiana case will continue to make its way through the courts, and could ultimately end up argued before the Supreme Court. Abortion opponents have also launched other legal challenges to mifepristone’s availability, as well as to the state laws that protect health care providers in states with abortion protections when they prescribe and mail the pills to people living in states with bans.

In separate dissents, Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito — the court’s two staunchest conservatives — criticized the Supreme Court’s decision to allow telehealth to continue.

Thomas argued that the court should block telehealth, saying the mailing of abortion medications violates the Comstock Act, an 1873 anti-obscenity law that has not been enforced in decades. Abortion opponents argue the law should be resurrected to ban mailing any drugs that can be used for abortions.

Alito, the author of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the court’s decision overturning Roe, wrote that mailing mifepristone undercut Dobbs by allowing people to circumvent their states’ abortion bans.

“Some States responded to Dobbs by making it even easier to obtain an abortion than it was before, and that is their prerogative. Other States, including Louisiana, made abortion illegal except in narrow circumstances,” Alito wrote. “But Louisiana’s efforts have been thwarted by certain medical providers, private organizations, and States that abhor laws like Louisiana’s and seek to undermine their enforcement.”

Abortion opponents swiftly criticized the ruling. Kristan Hawkins, who heads the anti-abortion activist group Students for Life, posted “ENFORCE THE COMSTOCK ACT” seven times in a single post on the social media platform X. In a subsequent post, she argued that the White House should step in to block the mailing of abortion pills.

In a statement, John Seago, who heads the Texas-based anti-abortion group Texas Right to Life, said the Trump administration could intervene, directing the FDA to reverse its decision approving telehealth distribution of mifepristone.

“We shouldn’t have to depend on the court to force the FDA to do the right thing,” Seago said. “The administration could choose to restore the in-person requirement themselves right now.”