bent into weird contortions, and wide cracks fracture the dark tarmac. Permafrost damage costs now total $35 million every year, money mostly spent on repairs to affected roads.3
Forests are affected too. Some areas of once-flat land look like bomb-sites, pockmarked with craters – sometimes several feet deep – where permafrost ice underneath them has melted and drained away. These uneven landscapes cause ‘drunken forests’, a phenomenon that has been reported right across Alaska. I saw plenty of evidence of this around Fairbanks: in one spot a long gash had been torn through the tall spruce trees, leaving them toppling over towards each other. Most of them were dying, some already lifeless, their brittle branches snapping off as I pushed through to take a closer look.
Permafrost degradation is one of the clearest signals that something unprecedented is happening in the far north. In Siberian cities hundreds of tall buildings have begun to subside and crack.4 Whole ecosystems are disappearing too: the Boreal forests which have grown throughout the region since the end of the last Ice Age are now collapsing into marshy bogs as the ground underneath thaws out. In Alaska, spruce and birch forests are being replaced by wetland – in some areas a quarter of the forest has disappeared in the last forty years.5
Whole sections of coastline are breaking off and falling into the sea, as the ice which has kept cliffs solid for centuries begins to melt. In both Canada and Siberia losses of up to forty metres a year have been observed, and in Alaska over half a kilometre has eroded from some stretches of coastline over the past few decades.6 This may not matter too much when nobody lives there – but many of these coastal areas have been inhabited by indigenous peoples for centuries.
And in Shishmaref, on the west coast of Alaska, the Native Americans who have lived on the same site for decades now live in daily terror of the sea.
SHISHMAREF
It was impossible to tell that Shishmaref was even on the coast. Although the village is actually squeezed onto a long, narrow barrier island, all I could see as our small aircraft looped over the area was a grey airstrip and about a hundred houses in the middle of an immense white plain. A layer of heavy grey cloud hung over the entire area, meeting the horizon in an apparently infinite expanse of nothingness. On the ground it was chilly to say the least: the temperature hovered around minus fifteen Celsius, and a few snow grains blew in the biting northwesterly wind.
Shishmaref is about as far west as you can get on the entire North American landmass. The tip of the Seward Peninsula, on which the village sits, is barely a hundred kilometres from the eastern edge of Russian Siberia. The International Date Line runs through the middle of the freezing Chukchi Sea which separates the two coastlines, meaning that the same morning sun rises a whole day later on the Alaskan side.
The two landmasses are so near that their peoples are closely related too. Almost all Shishmaref’s residents are Inupiat Eskimos, who share a close language and ancestry with their Siberian Eskimo relatives. (Unlike in Canada and Greenland, the name ‘Inuit’ never caught on in Alaska, and the terms ‘Eskimo’ and ‘Indian’ are still universally used to describe the two culturally distinct Native Alaskan first peoples, both by themselves and by Alaskans of non-Native descent.)
Indeed Alaskan Eskimo hunters, cut off from home by open-water leads appearing behind them in the sea ice, would sometimes accidentally spend entire summers in Siberia. A lost hunter’s family would never give up hope until the following winter, when men who had survived would return back over the newly frozen ice.
You still have to be careful out on the ice, Robert Iyatunguk, Shishmaref’s ‘erosion co-ordinator’, told me as he showed me round the village. Anyone who falls through into the water has only minutes to strip completely and change into dry clothes before they freeze to death. And sometimes the ice does strange things: ‘I was once out there on an ice floe with some friends and got this weird feeling of danger,’ he recalled. ‘We all cleared off and immediately the whole floe started to turn over.’ There is safety in numbers – no one goes out alone, and a group of hunters will always share the harvest equally.
Until comparatively recently Shishmaref’s entire food and clothing supply came from the surrounding environment: polar bears, seals, fish, walrus and caribou. Though dog sleds and bone arrows have now been exchanged for snowmachines and guns, and Eskimo kayaks replaced by wooden or fibreglass boats, ‘subsistence’ living remains a crucial part of people’s culture and livelihood. Bits of hunted animal – a frozen caribou leg or part of a seal – were propped up around almost every doorstep, and polar bear skins and dried fish hung on racks behind the houses. Not far from our temporary lodgings at the Lutheran pastor’s residence, a severed musk ox head stared at the grey sky through clouded, lifeless eyes.
A few decades ago people lived in ‘sod houses’, turfroofed dwellings dug out of the ground, dark and dingy but very well insulated from the winter cold. A few lumps further up the shore are all that remains of them – today everyone lives in wooden or prefabricated modern homes, scattered in rows all around the island.
Nine houses had to be moved during the last big storm, Robert Iyatunguk told me. As ninety-miles-per-hour winds whipped around them, and whole sections of thawed cliff tumbled into the raging sea, the whole community had mobilised to save the dwellings which were closest to the edge. It was dangerous work: not only could a house collapse on the people working under it to jack it up, but the ground itself could give way suddenly beneath them.
‘We lost fifty feet of ground in one night with that storm. We’re in panic mode now because of how much ground we’re losing.’
We crunched down a shallow slope where sandbags were protruding through the snow: the remnants of Shishmaref’s last battle with the sea. All the sea walls had failed, he went on. The water just undercut or washed over them. It seemed like nothing could prevent this loose, gravelly ground from eroding away.
Now the talk was of relocation – something that would have to be agreed by all 600 residents through a community ballot. (It was – over a year after I’d left – in July 2002.) It would cost $50 million, and there was no sign of the state authorities coming up with the cash. But the worst case scenario was no longer that of having to move the village, he said, but that of another big storm whilst they were still living in the danger zone.
Time is running out, Robert emphasised. ‘The wind is getting stronger, the water is getting higher, and it’s noticeable to everybody in town. It just kind of scares you inside your body and makes you wonder exactly when the big one is going to hit.’ And this ‘big storm’ throws a perpetual shadow over the community the longer it stays put: people cast anxious glances over at the horizon, and when a strong wind gets up, those closest to the shore often decamp to sleep at relatives’ houses.
There was an emergency evacuation plan of sorts – something partly within Robert’s responsibility that has given him many sleepless nights. In a few hours a C-130 aircraft could arrive, and evacuate all of Shishmaref’s residents within four return journeys. But could it operate during a storm? And what if the runway began to collapse? ‘If our airport runway gets flooded out and eaten away, there goes our evacuation by plane,’ Robert admitted. ‘Then we’d have to go to the next highest point in town, which would either be the church or the school.’
We stood together under the crumbling cliffs. Robert scuffed the base of it with his boot, and icy sand showered down. Up above us an abandoned house hung precariously over the edge, at least a third of its foundation protruding into thin air. The house next door had toppled over
