It’s a long way from the Bronx to Barrow. It’s even farther from Fairbanks to Ghana. Lewis Shapiro covered a lot of ground during his 90 years.

Shapiro, a sea-ice expert here at the Geophysical Institute of the University of Alaska Fairbanks, died on Aug. 24, 2025.

“Lew” was born in the Bronx borough of New York City on Oct. 23, 1934. He lived more than half of his 90 years in Alaska, but you always knew where he came from.

“Stick him in front of a baseball game, it was like he never left the Bronx,” his daughter Lee Shapiro, a librarian in Maryland, said at a recent memorial service in Fairbanks.

Shapiro loved the Yankees. And playing steel drums, and traveling to Barrow (now Utqiagvik) with a fledgling scientist to extract a chunk of sea ice from a frozen lagoon at 40 below.

He was

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