The Big Thaw
REPORTER: Aaron Thomas
It's 3am in the Arctic Circle and I have joined a seal hunt. We have been out here for hours but there's no danger of it getting dark. The sun won't set here for another four weeks. Time and time again, the seal dodges the bullets, only to pop up elsewhere in the maze of ice. Eventually, we lose sight of the seal altogether.
REPORTER: Where do you think that one escaped to?
REPPI SWAN: Uh, in the ice, he went inside the ice.
My guide, Reppi Swan, says it's been getting harder and harder to hunt here because the ice is getting thinner.
REPPI SWAN: When I was young, like 20, 30 years ago, it used to be at least 20 feet.
Ice that thick breaks into large floes, where animals have nowhere to hide. But times have changed.
REPPI SWAN: We're having harder time finding good ice and when we do find good ice, it's almost too late, for now the animal's passed. All we’ve got for years is mostly bad ice.
Hunting is crucial to the indigenous people here. They rely on seal oil and dried meat to see them through the long winter but the thin, fragmented ice means hunting these days is a frustrating business.
REPPI SWAN: It's changing. The ice is getting thinner. Warming up early. Getting cold late. Summer is snowing, winter is raining. Changed a lot.
Eventually, we head home empty-handed. Reppi lives in Kivalina, it's a village of about 400 people perched on a narrow barrier island, with the ocean on one side and a lagoon on the other. It's early summer, but you can still see the frozen sea ice stuck to the shore, which protects the island from ocean storms. But that ice has been forming later and later each year, leaving the island and its inhabitants unprotected. Today, the seas are peaceful but winter storms can be savage. Pounding waves tear at the edges of the settlement. Kivalina's residents fear that a future storm surge will engulf their homes.
BRANDON: Waves got pretty big the other year everybody had to evacuate down to Red Dog. I was one of them but I really didn't want to, but my mother told me too because I was still a young boy.
REPORTER: Yeah. How old were you then?
BRANDON: I was maybe 16, 17 years old. Now I'm 19. Now I don't want really want to leave Kivalina. This is where I grew up, where all my childhood memories are.
But Brandon's childhood home may not be around for much longer. Once covering 54 acres, residents have watched half of their island slip into the sea.
COLLEEN SWAN: Our elders used to talk about how this is the third ridge. And then there were two more ridges that went into the ocean.
REPORTER: But now they're all gone?
COLLEEN SWAN: Yeah.
Colleen Swan is a member of Kivalina's council. She says that after earlier attempts to hold back the erosion failed, the US Army Corps of Engineers built this sea wall.
COLLEEN SWAN: They started in 2007 and 2008, I think and they said that it will give us another 10-15 years to continue to inhabit this island and then after that we have to get off, they say.
REPORTER: Because it's going to go under water?
COLLEEN SWAN: They said that, uh, Kivalina is in imminent danger of flooding and if it floods, Kivalina will be covered with between four to six feet of water.
Across Alaska, over 170 communities report an erosion problem of some sort, with 25 towns facing a similar fate to Kivalina. 700km away, in Seward, in the state's south-west, tourists flock to take in the raw, natural beauty, but here too there are serious environmental changes. Here at Exit Glacier, markers along the valley floor show just how far the toe of the glacier once reached and how quickly it's receded in recent years and Exit Glacier is far from alone. A new movie called 'Chasing Ice' uses time-lapse photography, taken over many years, to document the Arctic's widespread glacial retreat.
DR. TAD PFEFFER, GLACIOLOGIST, UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO: Ordinary naturally, if you make climate warmer, the glacier shrinks a little bit and if you make the climate colder the glacier grows a little bit and those two things work to maintain a balance. But if it gets too warm, you cross the tipping point, climate no longer matters. It's irreversible. It's just gonna keep going.
Tad Pfeffer is a glacier scientist who appears on the film. He's also on the UN's next climate change report.
DR. TAD PFEFFER: And use that to try to understand iceberg transport.
Tad has been researching in Alaska for the past 40 years and is seeing alarming changes.
DR. TAD PFEFFER: It's warming, essentially twice as fast as the rest of the United States. The rate of warming of the planet is not uniform and it really is focused at the highest latitudes so a lot of the changes that we observe globally are happening sooner at a faster rate and a greater magnitude in polar regions, including Alaska.
There are 23,000 glaciers in Alaska, and according to Tad, they're all shrinking. One of them, Columbia Glacier in the south-west, is currently one of the fastest-moving glaciers in the world. Part of its retreat was captured for 'Chasing Ice'.
DR. TAD PFEFFER: Columbia Glacier is passed its tipping point. The glacier is moving down slope very fast but the iceberg calving is faster so the terminus actually retreats, even though the motion forward is very fast. That started in the early 1980s and our estimate is that may go on for another 15-25 years. Since Columbia started this rapid retreat in the early 1980s, it's retreated altogether about 25km so far. It could end up maybe 50%, 60% of its original area. Over the last decade, roughly, Columbia Glacier all by itself has contributed about 1% of global sea level rise.
The thawing of Alaska means enormous amounts of water are now on the move across the landscape. I'm flying over the Yukon-Kuskokwim delta. It's one of the largest river deltas in the world and perched on the western edge of it is the village of Newtok. It's a blustery day in Newtok, but the local school principal, Grant Kashatok, takes me down to the river's edge to see their problem.
GRANT KASHATOK, SCHOOL PRINCIPAL: There's a lot of erosion that's going on here in Newtok. And the tide going out right now, and so we've lost some land. We're standing right at the edge and these that are over here, they used to be, like, further on down maybe, like, a hundred feet away. And so they had to move them last summer to where they are now, just so that they don't fall into the Ninglick River.
Like Kivalina, Newtok is suffering from a range of climate-related problems. Melting permafrost means the houses are sinking but it's erosion from the rising Ninglick River, swollen with ice melt, that's threatening the village's existence.
GRANT KASHATOK: So, where we're standing right now won't be here after the next storm, probably.
With the US Army predicting the town's highest point, its school, will be under water by 2017, the people of Newtok decided they had to move the whole village, lock, stock and barrel. But progress has been painfully slow. Stanly Tom and his family are going to check on the new town site, 15km upriver. As Newtok's administrator, Stanly has been struggling to relocate the village and now a small contingent of military engineers has arrived to build much-needed infrastructure during the brief summer.
STANLY TOM: The road back...?
SOLDIER: The road goes, you can see those stakes. They go right up that way.
STANLY TOM: That way, OK.
SOLDIER: And you can see...
STANLY TOM: OK, I see. That's really nice. And that will lead all the way to the airport side.
While Stanly is enthusiastic about the help of the armed services, they will only be building a couple of projects for their own training purposes. Despite years of trying, only six new houses have been built here and Stanly still doesn't have the money to relocate the whole village.
STANLY TOM: The funding is, like, declining, you know? Especially the Federal Government, you know, they're not assisting us whatsoever. You know? And they don't respond to the erosion or the move. So it's really frustrating to see that happening here in Newtok.
Back in Kivalina, the hot summer has brought out the insects early, so safely drying fish for winter is proving challenging.
MAN: We've got California weather now.
The much bigger problem, though, is finding the funds to move the entire town to higher ground.
REPORTER: How much will it cost to relocate?
COLLEEN SWAN: I think the ball park that comes from the Corps Engineers is $250 million.
REPORTER: Right. And is that funding around? How is that gonna be paid for?
COLLEEN SWAN: It's not there. The funding is not available.
So, the people of Kivalina decided to sue the oil and power companies, who they think are responsible for climate change in the first place.
COLLEEN SWAN: They're not dealing with the cause of the problem which is what we tried to do with our lawsuit, going to the source because, um, that's where things need to change.
Their case was appealed all the way to the US Supreme Court, before the council lost so now they must rely on government funding.
SCOTT RUBY, ALASKAN COMMUNITY AND REGIONAL AFFAIRS: There isn't a pot of money either on the state or federal side and these moves are expensive. Kivalina has ranged from $200 million to $400 million for some of the sites they want for a population of, I think, 600, 700 people. Um, that is, um, a tough sell anyway. So, it's gonna be a phased move. Um, if it happens.
COLLEEN SWAN: I get angry, you know? I get angry at our government. The, um... Who are coming up with band-aid solutions.
I have come to Anchorage to meet with a human rights attorney who's an expert in this field.
ROBIN BRONEN, ALASKA IMMIGRATION JUSTICE PROJECT: We are in a heatwave, which I have lived here for 25 years and we have never had a heatwave like this. Ever. Every day, I wake up and I look out my window and it's sunny and I'm thinking, "Wow. This is scary."
Robin Bronen has been studying climate migration closely, she says one of the biggest problems here and around the world is that governments still haven't updated their definition of a disaster.
ROBIN BRONEN: Erosion is not one of the environmental events, nor is sea level rise one of the environmental events that could qualify as a disaster. So that's one of the problems. The other problem is the way that our disaster relief legislation is written is it's primarily to put people back to where they were and with climate change and sea level rise in particular, people are not gonna be able to go back home.
SCOTT RUBY: If the impacts get worse and you start getting communities in danger, the houses are getting inundated, broken down, washed out to sea, in the state system those become emergencies, then. And, really, the government is better at responding to emergencies after they've happened than mitigation before they've happened.
Cold comfort to Nathan and Sabrina Tom, whose Newtok home is first in the firing line from the encroaching river.
SABRINA TOM: Pretty sure it's gonna be right up to the house in about two summers.
NATHAN TOM: I wonder how they're gonna move houses, you know? That's something we kind of worry about. But I also think they wouldn't just leave us hanging like that, you know?
SABRINA TOM: I think they would.
NATHAN TOM: They would?
SABRINA TOM: They would.
Even if the money is found to complete the relocation, some people still have regrets about the changes it will mean to their lifestyle.
WOMAN: We won't be able to catch or to easily catch or pick, gather or catch. To me, it's not fair.
Fair or not, native Alaskans are now at the forefront of a modern-day crisis.
WOMAN: Yes, this global warming thing, you know, changing everybody's life.
ANJALI RAO: Aaron Thomas and the Alaskans nervously watching the sea rise towards their homes.
Reporter/Camera/Editor
AARON THOMAS
Producer
VICTORIA STROBL
Original music composed by
VICKI HANSEN
REPORTER: Aaron Thomas
It's 3am in the Arctic Circle and I have joined a seal hunt. We have been out here for hours but there's no danger of it getting dark. The sun won't set here for another four weeks. Time and time again, the seal dodges the bullets, only to pop up elsewhere in the maze of ice. Eventually, we lose sight of the seal altogether.
REPORTER: Where do you think that one escaped to?
REPPI SWAN: Uh, in the ice, he went inside the ice.
My guide, Reppi Swan, says it's been getting harder and harder to hunt here because the ice is getting thinner.
REPPI SWAN: When I was young, like 20, 30 years ago, it used to be at least 20 feet.
Ice that thick breaks into large floes, where animals have nowhere to hide. But times have changed.
REPPI SWAN: We're having harder time finding good ice and when we do find good ice, it's almost too late, for now the animal's passed. All we’ve got for years is mostly bad ice.
Hunting is crucial to the indigenous people here. They rely on seal oil and dried meat to see them through the long winter but the thin, fragmented ice means hunting these days is a frustrating business.
REPPI SWAN: It's changing. The ice is getting thinner. Warming up early. Getting cold late. Summer is snowing, winter is raining. Changed a lot.
Eventually, we head home empty-handed. Reppi lives in Kivalina, it's a village of about 400 people perched on a narrow barrier island, with the ocean on one side and a lagoon on the other. It's early summer, but you can still see the frozen sea ice stuck to the shore, which protects the island from ocean storms. But that ice has been forming later and later each year, leaving the island and its inhabitants unprotected. Today, the seas are peaceful but winter storms can be savage. Pounding waves tear at the edges of the settlement. Kivalina's residents fear that a future storm surge will engulf their homes.
BRANDON: Waves got pretty big the other year everybody had to evacuate down to Red Dog. I was one of them but I really didn't want to, but my mother told me too because I was still a young boy.
REPORTER: Yeah. How old were you then?
BRANDON: I was maybe 16, 17 years old. Now I'm 19. Now I don't want really want to leave Kivalina. This is where I grew up, where all my childhood memories are.
But Brandon's childhood home may not be around for much longer. Once covering 54 acres, residents have watched half of their island slip into the sea.
COLLEEN SWAN: Our elders used to talk about how this is the third ridge. And then there were two more ridges that went into the ocean.
REPORTER: But now they're all gone?
COLLEEN SWAN: Yeah.
Colleen Swan is a member of Kivalina's council. She says that after earlier attempts to hold back the erosion failed, the US Army Corps of Engineers built this sea wall.
COLLEEN SWAN: They started in 2007 and 2008, I think and they said that it will give us another 10-15 years to continue to inhabit this island and then after that we have to get off, they say.
REPORTER: Because it's going to go under water?
COLLEEN SWAN: They said that, uh, Kivalina is in imminent danger of flooding and if it floods, Kivalina will be covered with between four to six feet of water.
Across Alaska, over 170 communities report an erosion problem of some sort, with 25 towns facing a similar fate to Kivalina. 700km away, in Seward, in the state's south-west, tourists flock to take in the raw, natural beauty, but here too there are serious environmental changes. Here at Exit Glacier, markers along the valley floor show just how far the toe of the glacier once reached and how quickly it's receded in recent years and Exit Glacier is far from alone. A new movie called 'Chasing Ice' uses time-lapse photography, taken over many years, to document the Arctic's widespread glacial retreat.
DR. TAD PFEFFER, GLACIOLOGIST, UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO: Ordinary naturally, if you make climate warmer, the glacier shrinks a little bit and if you make the climate colder the glacier grows a little bit and those two things work to maintain a balance. But if it gets too warm, you cross the tipping point, climate no longer matters. It's irreversible. It's just gonna keep going.
Tad Pfeffer is a glacier scientist who appears on the film. He's also on the UN's next climate change report.
DR. TAD PFEFFER: And use that to try to understand iceberg transport.
Tad has been researching in Alaska for the past 40 years and is seeing alarming changes.
DR. TAD PFEFFER: It's warming, essentially twice as fast as the rest of the United States. The rate of warming of the planet is not uniform and it really is focused at the highest latitudes so a lot of the changes that we observe globally are happening sooner at a faster rate and a greater magnitude in polar regions, including Alaska.
There are 23,000 glaciers in Alaska, and according to Tad, they're all shrinking. One of them, Columbia Glacier in the south-west, is currently one of the fastest-moving glaciers in the world. Part of its retreat was captured for 'Chasing Ice'.
DR. TAD PFEFFER: Columbia Glacier is passed its tipping point. The glacier is moving down slope very fast but the iceberg calving is faster so the terminus actually retreats, even though the motion forward is very fast. That started in the early 1980s and our estimate is that may go on for another 15-25 years. Since Columbia started this rapid retreat in the early 1980s, it's retreated altogether about 25km so far. It could end up maybe 50%, 60% of its original area. Over the last decade, roughly, Columbia Glacier all by itself has contributed about 1% of global sea level rise.
The thawing of Alaska means enormous amounts of water are now on the move across the landscape. I'm flying over the Yukon-Kuskokwim delta. It's one of the largest river deltas in the world and perched on the western edge of it is the village of Newtok. It's a blustery day in Newtok, but the local school principal, Grant Kashatok, takes me down to the river's edge to see their problem.
GRANT KASHATOK, SCHOOL PRINCIPAL: There's a lot of erosion that's going on here in Newtok. And the tide going out right now, and so we've lost some land. We're standing right at the edge and these that are over here, they used to be, like, further on down maybe, like, a hundred feet away. And so they had to move them last summer to where they are now, just so that they don't fall into the Ninglick River.
Like Kivalina, Newtok is suffering from a range of climate-related problems. Melting permafrost means the houses are sinking but it's erosion from the rising Ninglick River, swollen with ice melt, that's threatening the village's existence.
GRANT KASHATOK: So, where we're standing right now won't be here after the next storm, probably.
With the US Army predicting the town's highest point, its school, will be under water by 2017, the people of Newtok decided they had to move the whole village, lock, stock and barrel. But progress has been painfully slow. Stanly Tom and his family are going to check on the new town site, 15km upriver. As Newtok's administrator, Stanly has been struggling to relocate the village and now a small contingent of military engineers has arrived to build much-needed infrastructure during the brief summer.
STANLY TOM: The road back...?
SOLDIER: The road goes, you can see those stakes. They go right up that way.
STANLY TOM: That way, OK.
SOLDIER: And you can see...
STANLY TOM: OK, I see. That's really nice. And that will lead all the way to the airport side.
While Stanly is enthusiastic about the help of the armed services, they will only be building a couple of projects for their own training purposes. Despite years of trying, only six new houses have been built here and Stanly still doesn't have the money to relocate the whole village.
STANLY TOM: The funding is, like, declining, you know? Especially the Federal Government, you know, they're not assisting us whatsoever. You know? And they don't respond to the erosion or the move. So it's really frustrating to see that happening here in Newtok.
Back in Kivalina, the hot summer has brought out the insects early, so safely drying fish for winter is proving challenging.
MAN: We've got California weather now.
The much bigger problem, though, is finding the funds to move the entire town to higher ground.
REPORTER: How much will it cost to relocate?
COLLEEN SWAN: I think the ball park that comes from the Corps Engineers is $250 million.
REPORTER: Right. And is that funding around? How is that gonna be paid for?
COLLEEN SWAN: It's not there. The funding is not available.
So, the people of Kivalina decided to sue the oil and power companies, who they think are responsible for climate change in the first place.
COLLEEN SWAN: They're not dealing with the cause of the problem which is what we tried to do with our lawsuit, going to the source because, um, that's where things need to change.
Their case was appealed all the way to the US Supreme Court, before the council lost so now they must rely on government funding.
SCOTT RUBY, ALASKAN COMMUNITY AND REGIONAL AFFAIRS: There isn't a pot of money either on the state or federal side and these moves are expensive. Kivalina has ranged from $200 million to $400 million for some of the sites they want for a population of, I think, 600, 700 people. Um, that is, um, a tough sell anyway. So, it's gonna be a phased move. Um, if it happens.
COLLEEN SWAN: I get angry, you know? I get angry at our government. The, um... Who are coming up with band-aid solutions.
I have come to Anchorage to meet with a human rights attorney who's an expert in this field.
ROBIN BRONEN, ALASKA IMMIGRATION JUSTICE PROJECT: We are in a heatwave, which I have lived here for 25 years and we have never had a heatwave like this. Ever. Every day, I wake up and I look out my window and it's sunny and I'm thinking, "Wow. This is scary."
Robin Bronen has been studying climate migration closely, she says one of the biggest problems here and around the world is that governments still haven't updated their definition of a disaster.
ROBIN BRONEN: Erosion is not one of the environmental events, nor is sea level rise one of the environmental events that could qualify as a disaster. So that's one of the problems. The other problem is the way that our disaster relief legislation is written is it's primarily to put people back to where they were and with climate change and sea level rise in particular, people are not gonna be able to go back home.
SCOTT RUBY: If the impacts get worse and you start getting communities in danger, the houses are getting inundated, broken down, washed out to sea, in the state system those become emergencies, then. And, really, the government is better at responding to emergencies after they've happened than mitigation before they've happened.
Cold comfort to Nathan and Sabrina Tom, whose Newtok home is first in the firing line from the encroaching river.
SABRINA TOM: Pretty sure it's gonna be right up to the house in about two summers.
NATHAN TOM: I wonder how they're gonna move houses, you know? That's something we kind of worry about. But I also think they wouldn't just leave us hanging like that, you know?
SABRINA TOM: I think they would.
NATHAN TOM: They would?
SABRINA TOM: They would.
Even if the money is found to complete the relocation, some people still have regrets about the changes it will mean to their lifestyle.
WOMAN: We won't be able to catch or to easily catch or pick, gather or catch. To me, it's not fair.
Fair or not, native Alaskans are now at the forefront of a modern-day crisis.
WOMAN: Yes, this global warming thing, you know, changing everybody's life.
ANJALI RAO: Aaron Thomas and the Alaskans nervously watching the sea rise towards their homes.
Reporter/Camera/Editor
AARON THOMAS
Producer
VICTORIA STROBL
Original music composed by
VICKI HANSEN