In light of a series of recent fatal landslides in Alaska, we set out to determine 1) the history of Alaskan landslides and 2) if the number of associated fatalities has increased with time. To answer our research questions, we searched a combination of 24 digital newspapers and online media sources, including historic digitized Alaskan newspapers, seeking landslides that affected people and/or infrastructure. This resulted in an inventory of 281 landslides occurring in Alaska since 1883. Our database includes the date on which the landslide occurred, its location and probable trigger, any reported injuries and/or fatalities, other reported damage, and the media source. Our inventory indicates that the number of reported landslides started to increase in the 1980's, and has increased dramatically in recent decades. We correlate the increase in landslides to a 1.2 degrees C to 3.4 degrees C increase in average annual air temperature and a 3% to 27% increase in precipitation over the last 50 years across Alaska. This change in climate is degrading permafrost, increasing the number of annual freeze/thaw events, and contributing to larger and more intense precipitation events - such as atmospheric rivers, all of which increase landslide susceptibility in various parts of the state. Alaska's last four fatal landslides occurred in Southeast Alaska, which has experienced the greatest increase in the number of landslides per capita. Our landslide database can serve as the initial inventory for analyses of landslides related to specific extreme weather events, as well as a resource to determine costs incurred from landslide-related damage.

This study shows the impact of black carbon (BC) aerosol atmospheric rivers (AAR) on the Antarctic Sea ice retreat. We detect that a higher number of BC AARs arrived in the Antarctic region due to increased anthropogenic wildfire activities in 2019 in the Amazon compared to 2018. Our analyses suggest that the BC AARs led to a reduction in the sea ice albedo, increased the amount of sunlight absorbed at the surface, and a significant reduction of sea ice over the Weddell, Ross Sea (Ross), and Indian Ocean (IO) regions in 2019. The Weddell region experienced the largest amount of sea ice retreat (similar to 33,000 km(2)) during the presence of BC AARs as compared to similar to 13,000 km(2) during non-BC days. We used a suite of data science techniques, including random forest, elastic net regression, matrix profile, canonical correlations, and causal discovery analyses, to discover the effects and validate them. Random forest, elastic net regression, and causal discovery analyses show that the shortwave upward radiative flux or the reflected sunlight, temperature, and longwave upward energy from the earth are the most important features that affect sea ice extent. Canonical correlation analysis confirms that aerosol optical depth is negatively correlated with albedo, positively correlated with shortwave energy absorbed at the surface, and negatively correlated with Sea Ice Extent. The relationship is stronger in 2019 than in 2018. This study also employs the matrix profile and convolution operation of the Convolution Neural Network (CNN) to detect anomalous events in sea ice loss. These methods show that a higher amount of anomalous melting events were detected over the Weddell and Ross regions. Impact Statement Sea ice protects ice sheets, which are melting at a very high rate to raise the sea level. In addition to global warming, this study is indicative that black carbon aerosols transported from anthropogenic wildfire events, such as from the Amazon, darken the snow, reduce their reflectance, increase the absorption of solar energy incident on the surface, and exacerbate the sea ice retreat. Thus, this study points out that anthropogenic wildfire impacts far away from a region can have a severe impact on sea ice and ice sheets over the Antarctic which has a sea level rise potential of 60 m. Our study shows that only over the Weddell region, sea ice retreat was 20,000 km(2) higher during the presence of BC transport events than other days in 2019.