Destabilizing Climate Closing In On Barrrow, AK, America's Northernmost Town

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Science backs up her concern: This year is on pace to be the hottest on record. As air and sea temperatures have notched up, there has been a warming of the permafrost, the thousands-of-years-old subsurface layer of frozen soil, rocks and water. That layer can be as much as 2,000 feet deep in parts of this area.

Gary Clow, a U.S. Geological Survey geophysicist who has spent 30 years measuring temperature here, says permafrost has warmed about five degrees since 1990. That makes soil soften, rise and shift, which Aamodt says affects everything that has been built on it: utility systems, roads, airports. It’s a change Aamodt fears: If fuel dumps or sewage lines leak into freshwater sources, major pollution ensues. With hundreds of miles of coast not many feet above sea level, the potential impact on health and lives is great.

When cyclones came through in 2000 and 2004, knocking out Barrow’s power supply, the result was flooded and contaminated drinking water. States of emergency are common occurrences here, and given the rising seas and coastal erosion, every year brings the threat of a storm that could wipe the town off the map, Aamodt says.

Barrow’s climate-change problem has been years in the making, says Anne Jensen, an ethnographic archaeologist who arrived in Barrow in 1983 and has been excavating some of the earliest human settlements found in this frigid area. The increasing floods and erosion have made her job a scramble against nature. By the time she secures funding and gets ready to enlarge a dig, a site that is often now at water’s edge, surging oceans washes everything away. It’s a frustrating way to make a living, she says. “The entire north coast of the North Slope — most of the sites are already gone. We have a big knowledge gap up there.”

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https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/above-the-arctic-circle-climate-change-closes-in-on-the-remote-town-of-barrow/2016/09/12/512c859a-43aa-11e6-8856-f26de2537a9d_story.html?tid=pm_national_pop_b