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Climate Change Alaska "Swept Away"

http://ej.msu.edu/media/NJClimateChange.pdf

42 N a t i o n a l J o u r n a l 9/13/08

Climate change

Alaska is the “tip of the spear” on global warming, and some of its native villages are literally disappearing. UPHEAVAL: The Inupiat Eskimo community of Kivalina, located north of the Arctic Circle, displays whale bones from a previous year’s hunt, while children play in the school gymnasium. Tribal leaders are at odds with federal officials over where to move the community, which is being displaced by worsening erosion. photos by margaret kriz 44 N a t i o n a l J o u r n a l 9/13/08

Swept Away

■■By Margaret Kriz

KIVALINA, Alaska—Janet Heh, administrator of this small Inupiat Eskimo village, maneuvers her red all-terrain vehicle down a gravel road and stops a few yards from the shore. Brushing aside a cloud of pesky mosquitoes, she points down the beach to where workers are using heavy construction equipment to move boulders into place for a new seawall. Residents are crossing their fingers that the rock barrier will protect Kivalina from another round of fierce fall storms “Maybe this one will work,” Heh says.

9/13/08 N a t i o n a l J o u r n a l 43

Every autumn since 2004, Kivalina has been punished by storms that have washed away protective beaches and eroded the ground under some homes on the 8-mile-long barrier island. In 2006, state and local officials constructed an experimental seawall of plastic and metal baskets filled with sand. When a mild storm struck, the embankment failed.

Last September, many of Kivalina’s 380 citizens were evacuated when a large squall approached the island in northwest Alaska. Leaders feared that high waves would overturn the community’s oil-storage tanks and cause toxic chemicals to spill into the village and the nearby waters. Although the storm dissipated, the threat motivated local officials to move the tanks to higher ground on the southern end of the island. Meanwhile, the state Legislature coughed up $3 million to begin building the rock barrier, which the Army Corps of Engineers says should last for 15 years.

But the wall is just a temporary solution. Over the next 15 years, Kivalina’s residents will have to move from the island, a relocation that the Corps estimates will cost $150 million to $250 million.

Lying 80 miles north of the Arctic Circle, Kivalina is one of six native villages that Alaska officials say are at critical risk from the effects of increasingly intense storms, melting permafrost, and accelerating erosion caused by climate change. Another 184 of Alaska’s native villages also face serious problems tied to rising temperatures, according to a 2004 study by the Government Accountability Office. “We in Alaska are firsthand global-warming witnesses,” says Deborah Williams, president of Alaska Conservation Solutions, a group that focuses on climate-change issues.

Today, the annual average temperature in Alaska is 4 degrees Fahrenheit higher than it was 50 years ago—a larger increase than in other parts of the nation, according to the U.S. Global Change Research Program. During that time, the state’s growing season has lengthened by more than 14 days, according to the group. Some scientists predict that Alaska’s average temperatures could jump by an additional 5 to 18 degrees by 2100.

Such a dramatic shift would radically alter the state’s landscape, where 80 percent of the subsoil is icy permafrost. “Here, if you have a degree or 2 of warming, you can have large structural changes,” says Larry Hinzman, director of the International Arctic Research Center at the University of Alaska (Fairbanks). “It’s not just that the permafrost could thaw, but also glaciers would melt.”

Warmer temperatures would increase the cost of building and maintaining roads, water and sewer systems, schools, and other public buildings by 10 to 20 percent, according to a 2007 report by the University of Alaska (Anchorage). Melting permafrost could cause roads and foundations to buckle, and in some areas the infrastructure could become more vulnerable to flooding or fire. More than twice the size of Texas, Alaska is surrounded on three sides by water. The state’s 33,000-mile coast, which accounts for more than half of the entire U.S. coastline, is especially vulnerable to rising sea levels triggered by climate change.

The escalating crisis has Alaska’s politicians scrambling. Last year state officials, many of whom had earlier denied that the climate was warming, began taking a closer look. Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, now the Republican vice presidential nominee, set up a Climate Change Subcabinet Group to address the immediate problems facing the native villages. The panel will also consider how Alaska, which depends heavily on royalties from the oil industry, can curb its greenhouse-gas emissions.

Alaska’s congressional delegation is pushing for federal funding to help state residents adjust. During debate on climate change legislation this summer, Alaska’s senators persuaded Democratic leaders to include $50 billion for adaptation programs in the state. The package later died on the Senate floor, but action on global warming is expected to be a top priority in the next Congress.

Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, says that her state is the “tip of the spear” on climate change in the United States. “Clearly, climate change is there; it’s real,” she said in an interview. “We can see it happening in Alaska more so than in other parts of the country.” Murkowski is in line to become the ranking Republican on the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee in the 111th Congress, putting her in a key position to influence the legislative debate on climate change.

Of course, Alaska would gain even more clout if Republican presidential nominee John McCain wins in November, elevating Palin to the national stage and into the White House.

HEATING UP: Climate change is thawing the permafrost subsoil underlying 80 percent of Alaska. Along the oil pipeline, which runs the length of the state, engineers have installed brush-like equipment that releases ground heat. Scientists warn that ice imbedded in the permafrost could melt (below).

Digging Deep Into the Permafrost

FOX, Alaska—Ten miles north of Fairbanks, at the edge of what was once gold-rush territory, the Army Corps of Engineers operates a research facility dug into a hill of permafrost. Constructed in the 1960s to study mining and road-building techniques, the tunnel now gives scientists a rare and important view of the underside of Alaska’s frozen subsoil.

At the surface, Alaska geology consists of a layer of soil that freezes and thaws with the seasons. But in 80 percent of the state, the next layer of subsoil is permafrost that has stayed relatively stable— and frozen—since the last Ice Age, 30,000 years ago. Inside the tunnel, scientists can examine the components of the permafrost, from the hardened silt and stone to the massive ribbons of frozen streams and ice wedges that formed as the Earth expanded and contracted.

Understanding the terrain’s hidden strengths and weaknesses was important to the engineers who built the Alaskan oil pipeline, which cuts through the center of the state. They came to the tunnel to test the endurance of the frozen soils. NASA researchers used the tunnel to test soil-sampling techniques for the space agency’s mission to Mars.

Now climate-change scientists are coming to study how Alaska’s warming temperatures are affecting ground conditions.

In recent decades, warmer surface temperatures have triggered changes in the permafrost. At sites near the tunnel, the ground temperatures have increased by at least 1 degree Celsius, according to site coordinator Charles Collins, a physical scientist with the Corps’s Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory. Climate scientists say that if the warming trend continues throughout the state, the surface of some parts of Alaska could begin to sink.

“If the ice in the permafrost melts, then you can have large amounts of surface subsidence” or collapse, explained Larry Hinzman, director of the International Arctic Research Center at the University of Alaska (Fairbanks). “The problem is, a lot of our structures in Fairbanks were built in the ’70s and early ’80s based on soil temperatures during the previous 30 years.” Now the soils are warming, and buildings, roads, and runways are likely to be affected. Engineers have developed technologies to help keep the ground frozen. Along the oil pipeline, for example, they have installed brush-like devices called thermosyphons to pull the heat from the ground and release it into the air. “There are engineering fixes that can keep the ground frozen and keep pipelines and buildings safe,” Hinzman said. Such technology is expensive, however. The state’s permafrost layer, which varies in depth depending on the average local temperature, isn’t going to disappear any time soon, Collins said. But some areas are already feeling the effects of permafrost thaw. In the Tanana Flats south of Fairbanks, the ground under the birch forest has partially melted, causing trees to tilt and collapse. Climate scientists also worry that thawing permafrost will release high levels of carbon dioxide from dead plants that have been trapped in the frozen ground for centuries. —M.K.

Alarming Changes

The Alaskans who live in the native villages have been among the first to feel the effects of global warming—a phenomena that some of them call a “fever on the earth.” The tribal communities, some of which can be traced back 10,000 years, have survived by vigilantly watching the natural world, noted Patricia Cochran, an Inupiat Indian who is executive director of the Alaska Native Science Commission.

Over the past several decades, the climate has been changing with unprecedented speed, she said. “Our abilities to read the weather, as we have been able to do for a long period of time, are just not the same,” Cochran said, “because the conditions are changing so rapidly. We’re literally losing people to extreme weather events that are not easily predictable anymore.”

In Kivalina, which was long protected by the accumulated ice that weakened the fall winds, the coast has been battered, said Enoch Adams Jr., who grew up on the island and heads the village’s relocation planning committee. Historically snow would collect on the ocean surface and form slush in September, explained Adams, who also represents Kivalina on the Northwest Arctic Borough council. “The winds and the waves would push the slush to the shore and form shore-fast ice,” he said. “That would create a barrier of sorts on our beach.”

In recent decades, however, warmer temperatures have lingered into September. The benevolent snows have been replaced by rain, and the fall storms intensify as they travel over open seas, whipping up waves that hammer the islands. “We talk to elders, and they tell us that they know erosion has been going on, but they’ve never seen it happen this fast before,” Adams said.

Kivalina residents report other alarming changes. Last summer village elder Joe Swan discovered that the ground around his ice cellar, a traditional meat freezer dug into the permafrost, had thawed. The hole filled with water, spoiling the caribou and seal meat he had stored there months earlier.

Along Kivalina’s shore, the level of the Chukchi Sea is rising. The island has been pelted with rain in the middle of winter—a time when temperatures historically dropped to 40 degrees below zero. In January 2007, winds unexpectedly blew the shore ice away, which tribal elders said was unprecedented. Large sinkholes have developed along the shore of the Wulik River, the source of Kivalina’s drinking water. (The community has no municipal water or sewer system; residents rely on water hauled from the river and on bucket toilets.)

The rising temperatures are shortening the region’s hunting seasons. Bearded seals, which the natives call ugruk, are now accessible for only a couple of weeks each spring, rather than for a month or more. This year the ice vanished so quickly that Kivalina’s hunters never got the chance to harvest walrus. That’s worrisome for families, some of whom depend on hunting for 95 percent of their food, Adams said.

And then there is the thriving mosquito population, which used to peak in July but now hangs on well into the fall. “August was not supposed to be the month of mosquitoes,” said the 73-year-old Swan. “They were supposed to fade away.” In late August, Swan said, a group of Kivalina residents went to the mainland tundra to begin berry picking but were forced to run away from the mosquitoes. “It didn’t used to be that way at berry-picking time,” he said.

Good News, Bad News

A year ago, the Arctic sea ice at the North Pole, which melts during the summer months into September and then refreezes in the winter, diminished to its lowest level in recorded history, a phenomena that many scientists attribute to climate change.

At about the same time, dozens of German tourists unexpectedly showed up at the whale exhibition in the Inupiat village of Barrow, the northernmost city in the United States. Barrow is not connected to the rest of the state by roads, so visitors usually arrive by plane. But the Germans traveled to Alaska by boat through the ice-free Northwest Passage along Canada’s northern coast. Barrow’s town leaders and the U.S. Coast Guard admit that they weren’t prepared for the onslaught of tourists. “It was a total surprise to everyone,” said David Harding, a spokesman for Barrow.

This year, with the Arctic ice once again melting at a record pace, the Germans have promised to come back to Barrow. “This time, U.S. Customs and Immigration officials will be waiting for them,” Harding said. According to the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colo., the Arctic sea ice this summer melted to its second lowest size on record.

Climate change is a good-news, bad-news story for Alaska, according to a March report by the Legislature’s Joint Alaska Climate Impact Assessment Commission. On the plus side, melting Arctic ice opens the door for development of a commercial shipping industry that could bring more business and jobs to the state. “Access to northern Europe via the northern sea route and to the eastern United States via the Northwest Passage [is] vital to commercial shipping interests,” the report noted.

Industry is already expanding oil and natural-gas development operations in the Arctic region, which could bring additional royalties to Alaska. This fall, the U.S. Geological Survey plans to map the unexplored Arctic Ocean floor to determine where oil, natural-gas, and mining development might take place. In fact, the countries bordering the ocean are in a race to tap its potential mineral resources.

As Alaska’s warm weather lingers into fall, more tourists are likely to cruise the state’s shores, visit Denali National Park and Preserve, fish in the world-class waters, and hunt in the immense wilderness areas. Scientists from across the globe are flocking to Alaska to study the effects of climate change. “Research of all types in Alaska is a $300 million-per-year proposition and a growth sector, in large measure because of climate-change research,” according to the state report.

Some native communities hope that climate change will have a positive side. “You can see a gleam in some whalers’ eyes because they say, maybe this will be good for whaling,” said Glenn Sheehan, executive director of the Barrow Arctic Science Consortium. “They hope that, somehow, warming eventually will wind up creating more food for the whales.” The warmer coastal waters have led salmon populations to migrate into the northern reaches of the state, although southern populations of the fish are suffering.

Many native leaders, scientists, and environmentalists warn, however, that increased ship traffic and oil exploration in the Arctic will inevitably cause oil spills and other pollution problems. “The great fear of people who live on the North Slope is that all this activity inevitably will lead to some kind of oil spill or blowout that can’t be dealt with because of ice,” Sheehan said. The new commercial activity could also infringe on the sea mammal hunting areas that indigenous Alaskans depend on for food. The open seas are already attracting commercial fishing boats that are competing with the subsistence fishermen.

Now scientists worry that the environmentally sensitive caribou may alter their migration path to look for new sources of food. That would be a blow to the 300 residents of Anaktuvuk Pass, who rely on the caribou for food.

Climate change is also changing the face of the boreal forest in the south-central part of the state. Warm, dry weather creates perfect conditions for insect infestation and disease among the birch, white spruce, and black spruce trees that dominate the terrain. Those species have thrived in the region’s historically cold and wet conditions, and they have struggled during recent summers.

In the 1990s, the Kenai Peninsula along Alaska’s southern coast experienced a decade of warm summers and mild winters that triggered a catastrophic outbreak of bark beetles. The pests killed 3 million acres of spruce trees, half of the forestland on the peninsula. The attack ended only after the bugs ran out of mature trees to kill, according to Ed Berg, an ecologist with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. He said that unless the winters get significantly colder—it takes temperatures of 40 degrees below zero or lower to wipe out the beetle population—the insects could hit the trees that were too small in the first go-round but are now maturing.

Salmon are also diminishing in the warmer temperatures on the Kenai Peninsula and are increasingly likely to have fungal infections, Berg said. Across the state, salmon are falling prey to parasite-related infections, bacteria, and other disease-spreading organisms. Some native elders predict that salmon will disappear from much of Alaska in the next 10 years, said Larry Merculieff, an Aleut leader who is deputy director of the Alaska Native Science Commission.

In the coming years, Berg said, Alaska could get some relief from the hot, dry conditions. “Some folks, like some of the scientists at [the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration], say that we’re now trending toward a cooler phase,” he said. “But even if that’s the case, the cool summers will not be as cool as they were 50 years ago.” By all estimates, he said, the average temperature in Alaska is expected to get warmer.

Too Far Gone

In April, Palin’s Immediate Action Workgroup, which is part of Climate Change Subcabinet Group, recommended that the state finally take the lead in helping Alaskans cope with climate change. In previous years, state officials were noticeably absent from the discussions, and the native communities relied on piecemeal help from federal agencies and tribal groups. This summer, the Legislature allocated $14 million to aid six villages in building new erosion-control systems and drawing up relocation plans, and to help other tribal leaders assess how warming temperatures are affecting their villages.

In the gravest situation is Newtok, a small Yupik Eskimo village on the southeastern coast that the Corps of Engineers has determined is too far gone to save. Located at the confluence of the Ninglick and Newtok rivers, the community has already lost its landfill and barge landing site to soil erosion and infilling of the rivers.

Erosion is not a new problem for Newtok. In the late 1950s, native leaders used dog sleds to move the town’s sod houses over winter ice from its disappearing home to its current location. In the last decade, however, conditions deteriorated quickly as warm sea waters thawed the permafrost under the village. This time around, moving Newtok will be more complicated and expensive because of the community’s infrastructure, schools, clinics, and government buildings.

If a major storm were to ravage Newtok this fall, its residents would probably be relocated to Fairbanks, said Michael Black, deputy commissioner of Alaska’s Commerce, Community, and Economic Development Department and the co-chairman of the Immediate Action Workgroup. Such a move could devastate the native culture, Black acknowledged. “You’d be moving Yupik Eskimo coastal village people to the interior of Alaska, which is in the middle of one of the largest non-native communities in the state. That has negative consequences.”

That kind of abrupt relocation would be particularly painful to villages that have endured for centuries. The native people of Shishmaref, for example, have lived on their barrier island on the western coast for at least 4,000 years, said Tony Weyiouanna Sr., who until recently headed the city’s relocation committee.

With their village being washed away by storms, however, the residents of Shishmaref are resigned to moving from their ancestral home. “In 2002, the majority of people voted to relocate,” Weyiouanna said. “But even if we voted yes to relocate, there are probably not very many people that actually want to move. I voted to relocate, but not by choice. I don’t want to move. This is our culture.”

Newtok, Shishmaref, and the other native villages hope to keep their communities and cultures intact by moving en masse, an approach backed by state and federal officials. “We want to help the communities find a place as close as we can to where they are currently if they need to relocate and if they chose to relocate,” Black said. “We’ll offer them some of the means and mechanisms to get to that site, if they choose to.”

That plan could work for Newtok and Shishmaref, whose leaders have agreed on new sites for their communities. Newtok has already built three homes at the new location and hopes to construct a road and a barge landing site to help transfer some of the community’s existing buildings to the site.

Locking Horns

Kivalina, however, is following a more difficult path. Like the people of Newtok, Kivalina’s residents were once nomadic, moving with the seasons to obtain food. The village was established in the early 1900s when the Bureau of Indian Affairs built a school on the island and ordered the native families to bring their children to classes. Now the community has about 80 homes built on short stilts above the permafrost.

Kivalina’s people have been talking about moving for decades, because the town, which is crammed on only 2 square miles of land, has become seriously overcrowded. They also want sewer and water systems, which state officials have said would be too expensive to construct on the barrier island. After years of delay, coastal erosion is forcing village leaders to take action. “Before, moving was just one of the options,” said Colleen Swan, tribal administrator of Kivalina and Joe Swan’s daughter. “Now we don’t have a choice. We have to get off of this island.”

But local leaders are locking horns with federal officials over where the community should go. Residents prefer a site that’s just across the lagoon from their current home and near the river where they have traditionally hunted and fished. Army Corps officials say that site is in a floodplain and would eventually succumb to erosion and flooding.

Federal experts have proposed two other sites several miles north of Kivalina, on higher and rockier ground at the edge of the tundra. Kivalina residents object that those locations are too windy, a factor that could hike their heating costs. More important to the village residents, the proposed sites are too far from hunting. “We need to have access to the ocean for seal hunting, whale hunting,” Joe Swan noted. “We need to stay close to the river. That’s why Kivalina was settled here.”

Efforts to negotiate a solution have been hampered by a lack of money and by the involvement of multiple agencies that generate layers of red tape. “There really isn’t any agency that has responsibility for addressing climate change,” Colleen Swan said. The state’s entrance to the debate has further muddied the process, contended Kivalina relocation chief Adams. “It’s good that the state is finally getting involved,” he said. “But we’re rehashing the same things over and over again.”

Black said that state officials are not going to force Kivalina or any other community to move to a new location. “We’re not going to pick up an entire community and move it to that site,” he said. “My own personal feeling is that when any agency takes the approach that they’re going to force an entire community to move, then it’s really not much different than moving the Cherokee to Oklahoma. And I think that’s not what the government wants to do—forced relocation.”

But Alaskan officials are beginning to recognize the magnitude of the job ahead. This year’s $14 million allocation for immediate work on the six communities is “just the beginning, and that concerns a number of people,” Black said. With each community move expected to cost upwards of $100 million, he said, “exactly how much of an obligation is the state of Alaska going to assume?”

Things to Come

Last fall, as Arctic sea ice melted at an unprecedented pace, thousands of walruses moved off the dwindling ice floes and took up residence on Alaska’s northern coast near Wainwright. “It was the first time in written or oral history that the people of Wainwright saw this,” noted F. Stuart (Terry) Chapin, an ecology professor at the Institute of Arctic Biology at the University of Alaska (Fairbanks). Chapin reasoned that the walruses, which are bottomfeeders, probably came ashore because the ice that they usually use as a home base drifted into waters that were too deep for feeding.

“My understanding was that the community was incredibly restrained— there was no mass harvest of walruses,” Chapin said. “But the community is very, very concerned. Climate change is wreaking havoc on the way they’ve traditionally used and interacted with the land and sea.”

Scientists are increasingly working with the native communities to gather information about on-the-ground changes in Alaska and to gain a historical perspective on environmental conditions, Chapin said. “These are areas where, from a Western science point of view, we have relatively sparse data,” he said. “So we find ourselves going more and more to local and indigenous observations.”

While the scientists work to understand the natural changes caused by the warming climate, native communities and government officials are looking for ways to adapt. In Shishmaref, village leaders decided to raise public awareness and attract government money for their efforts by taking their story to the international media. “Shishmaref is a subsistence-based community, and we have no resources,” Weyiouanna said. “So I decided to try to use the media as a tool.”

But the traditionally isolated community has paid a heavy toll for moving into the spotlight. After years of coordinating press visits, Weyiouanna has resigned as Shishmaref relocation director. “He and so many others in the community have given up everything to not only lobby for a little understanding but also to explain their story to outsiders,” Murkowski said. “Understandably, the natives are tired of it.”

Kivalina, which has also become a stop on the international global-warming media tour, took other action to gain public attention. In February, the city and tribe sued ExxonMobil and 23 other energy companies for damages related to climate change. Based on the class-action suits filed against the tobacco industry, the Kivalina lawsuit charged that the companies are major contributors to climate change that is threatening to destroy the coastal community. The energy companies are seeking to have the charges dismissed.

In Washington, Murkowski is pushing Congress to allow oil and natural-gas development in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, and to dedicate some of the royalties to adaptation programs and to help communities install wind, geothermal, and other clean-energy projects. “We’ve got a bank that’s sitting up there right now,” she said. “ANWR is nothing but a big fat ol’ energy bank. Let’s use those resource dollars to make alternative energy work here.”

Palin’s sub-Cabinet panel, meanwhile, is developing a set of recommendations to help Alaskans adapt. Chapin, who is a member of the panel’s Adaptation Advisory Group, noted that the state is sailing in uncharted waters. “There are a couple of states that have set up adaptation task forces, but they’re at the organizational stage,” he said. “The governor has tasked us with coming up with policy recommendations within the next year. We’re on a fast track.”

The first line of defense on climate change is the native communities, Chapin said. “Rural Alaska is probably further along than anybody else at recognizing the importance of these issues and beginning to think about adaptation options.”

In Kivalina, Joe Swan noted that the swarming mosquitoes in August was a sign that sea ice will not be forming in September. Government weather experts predict that the island community will be hit with rain, not snow, well into the autumn. It’s another year to watch for fall storms.

“Alaska is stuck with at least 50 years of climate warming, regardless of what policies are put in place,” Chapin said. “We’re already having really tough problems, and it’s going to get a lot worse. We’re stuck because of the inaction that we collectively are responsible for over the last half-century.”

Native leaders say that Alaska’s climate-change problems are a warning to the rest of the nation. “You think the lower 48 [states] or any part of the world is going to be isolated from this stuff?” Aleut leader Merculieff asked. “No way, because everything is connected.”

This story was partially researched through a fellowship with Michigan State University’s Knight Center for Environmental Journalism. The author can be reached at mkriz@nationaljournal.com. Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin set up a Climate Change Subcabinet Group to address the problems facing native villages. ■■Seeking Solutions AP/Chris Miller

Native hunters confirm that climate change has altered ice conditions. Sea ice is not as thick as it used to be, and it doesn’t extend as far from shore—thus making it harder to catch seals, walruses, and whales. According to the Global Change Research Program, sea ice off of Alaska’s shores has retreated by 14 percent since 1978 and thinned by 40 percent since the 1960s. “Imagine trying to pull a 50-ton whale up on an ice ledge and the ledge is melting out from under you,” Sheehan explained. “It doesn’t work very well.” Evidence that Alaska is America’s front line on climate change extends beyond the coastal communities. Last summer, north central Alaska was hit by the state’s largest-ever tundra fire. A lightning strike burned 250,000 acres of abnormally dry land outside of the small native village of Anaktuvuk Pass, wiping out the lichen plants that the caribou eat as they migrate north.