Farthest North The End of Ice

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Snow has been falling. Light comes late and goes early – nineteen hours of darkness, but the white ground and white sky brings radiance to this midwinter city. From my high perch in the Captain Cook Hotel the only patch of darkness is Cook Inlet where open water slaps the shore and pancake ice has rotten into gray rounds that drift out as the tide changes.

Arctic Alaska is the first of eight stops on my yearlong circumpolar journey to hear from indigenous Arctic people what they know about climate change and how it is affecting their lives.

Ice cover creates calm wind and calm waters and mirrors the self-discipline and restraint of the Inuit people whose patience and steadfastness in the face of danger has ensured their survival for over 15,000 years. A retreating ice pack in winter is a lid pulled back: open water causes chaotic weather and gives way to storms.

On this same day eighteen years ago I passed through Anchorage. Cook Inlet was completely frozen. In Fairbanks the temperature plummeted from 56 degrees below zero F. to minus 82 degrees F. The town closed down for two weeks, enclosed by frost-fall. When the skies cleared curtains of northern lights whipped over our heads. At the Raven Bar in Gold Stream I met a seal biologist who invited me to visit his spring camp on the ice in Arctic Canada. After, I went on to Greenland where I’ve traveled with Inuit hunters for fourteen years.

In 1991 the seasonal sea ice, even in May, was at least four feet thick. Now it’s all sikuliaq – new ice - often only four inches thick, melting and refreezing erratically.

The journey begins on the Arctic coast of Alaska where retreating sea ice has caused severe coastal erosion to occur. The villages of Shismaref, Kivalina, and Wales are eroding away. The retreat of the pack ice has serious consequences on the entire Arctic ecosystem: walrus, ringed seals, beluga whales, seabirds, and fish are impacted. Open water means more stormy seas, and these erode even more ice and make subsistence hunting for all coastal peoples impossible.

Open water anywhere in the Arctic means there is no albedo effect: solar heat is no longer radiated back into space. The seas warm up. Marine ecosystems are changed. Ice acts like the lid on a pot: it keeps the storm-tormented seas contained. Without ice, the coasts are battered by wind waves and unseasonable storms. The entire villages of Shismaref and Kivalina are being moved.

Accompanied by a renowned Alaskan artist, Joe Sennungetuk, a native of Wales, Alaska, we will stay in his home village, then travel to nearby communities to see and hear how the climate crisis is effecting their subsistence lives and rich cultural traditions.