The village at the tip of the iceberg

For more than 2,000 years the Yup’ik Eskimos have carved out a subsistence living on the frozen wastes of southwest Alaska. But now the ice is melting the village is having to move to a new site, and the world’s first climate-change refugees face an uncertain future

…About 6ft below the surface level of the tumbled earth is a layer of ice, hard to the touch, glistening faintly in the daylight. It looks unassuming, but it tells a story of monumental significance. It is permafrost, and it has been there beneath thousands of miles of Alaska, Canada, Russia and beyond for thousands of years, acting as a solid wall that holds the sea at bay and maintaining the integrity of the land. It also acts as foundations for the roads and buildings that sit upon it, Peter John’s house included.

But that glistening is ominous. The permafrost is melting. The layer of ice in the crevice in which I stand is weeping, shedding large teardrops that are quickly soaked up by the soggy earth lower down. I can see too what is left behind when the ice melts – nothing but friable soil, as soft and spongy as rum baba.


It is this layer of melting ice that has turned Newtok into what one observer described as the Ground Zero of global warming. According to Nasa, temperatures in Alaska have risen more than any other place on the planet in the past 50 years – by some 4F on average, and up to 10F in winter. The Arctic in general has experienced a rate of warming that is double the earth’s average, in part as a result of what is known as positive feedback. The brilliant white surface of ice and snow normally reflects most radiation from the sun back into space. But once the ice starts to melt through warming temperatures, the exposed land absorbs the radiation, thus causing further warming and melting. The vicious cycle set in train melts the frozen segment of tundra that forms the permafrost. Reports suggest it is thinning by more than an inch a year, turning a once rock-solid fortress into floppy gunge.

It doesn’t take much imagination to conceive of the impact on the 90,000 Alaskans who live on top of the permafrost, most of them Eskimos or Inuit. The few roads that exist are now cracking and caving in, like Newtok’s undulating boardwalk. Of the state’s 213 Alaska Native villages, 184 are severely affected by erosion and flooding. Six have been classed in need of immediate help, and of those Newtok is top of the list.

Guardian