VANISHING ALASKA

By MARGOT ROOSEVELT/SHISHMAREF

Shishmaref is melting into the ocean. Over the past 30 years, the Inupiaq Eskimo village, perched on a slender barrier island 625 miles north of Anchorage, has lost 100 ft. to 300 ft. of coastline--half of it since 1997. As Alaska's climate warms, the permafrost beneath the beaches is thawing and the sea ice is thinning, leaving its 600 residents increasingly vulnerable to violent storms. One house has collapsed, and 18 others had to be moved to higher ground, along with the town's bulk-fuel tanks.

Giant waves have washed away the school playground and destroyed $100,000 worth of boats, hunting gear and fish-drying racks. The remnants of multimillion-dollar seawalls, broken up by the tides, litter the beach. "It's scary," says village official Luci Eningowuk. "Every year we agonize that the next storm will wipe us out."

The erosion of the island, now only a quarter-mile wide, is not the only ominous sign that large changes are afoot. The ice-fishing season that used to start in October has moved to December because the ocean freezes later each year. Berry picking begins in July instead of August. Most distressing for the Inupiaq is that thin ice makes it harder to hunt oogruk--the bearded seal that is a staple of their diet and culture. At the Nayokpuk Trading Co., where infant formula sells for $21 a package and the only eggs for sale, sent by bush plane, sit broken in their shells, the talk is of the disruption of nature's rhythms. "When was the last time we went hunting on snow machines?" owner Percy Nayokpuk asks a customer. "About 15 years," answers Reuben Weyiouanna. Because a loaded snowmobile would break through the ice, the elders these days have to drag their boats seven miles across the ice to go hunting--and the season begins in May instead of June. "If the weather keeps changing," says Nayokpuk, "it will mean the end of Shishmaref."

The fate of one stubborn little village normally wouldn't make much of a splash. But Shishmaref and other Alaskan settlements are attracting national attention because scientists see them as gloomy harbingers. "Shishmaref is the canary in the coal mine--an indicator of what's to come elsewhere," says Gunter Weller, director of the University of Alaska's Cooperative Institute for Arctic Research.

Global warming, caused in part by the burning of oil and gas in factories and cars, is traumatizing polar regions, where the complex meteorological processes associated with snow, permafrost and ice magnify its effects. A study published in Science last week reported that glaciers in West Antarctica are thinning twice as fast as they did in the 1990s. In Alaska the annual mean air temperature has risen 4DEGF to 5DEGF in the past three decades--compared with an average of just under 1DEGF worldwide. As a result, the state's glaciers are melting; insects are destroying vast swaths of forest; and thawing permafrost is sinking roads, pipelines and homes. Arctic Ocean ice has shrunk 5% to 10%, at an accelerating rate. Says Weller: "There is natural variability, but the evidence is overwhelming that humanity has altered the climate."

It must be said that if Shishmaref sinks beneath the waves, it won't be much of a loss to global tourism. The village is so remote that no road connects it to the outside world. The occasional barge unloads fuel after the ice breaks up, and when the weather is good, battered bush planes ferry in DVDs and cartons of Cheetos from the Sam's Club in Fairbanks. Visually, this village is nothing like the romantic images of Eskimos in igloos from old National Geographic magazines. Weathered clapboard houses, surrounded by rusty engine parts, sit helter-skelter along muddy paths. Indoor plumbing is rare, and drinking water collects in plastic buckets under rain gutters. Empty Coke cans and cigarette packets litter the streets. In the ramshackle town hall, a sign reads, CITY OF SHISHMAREF BINGO WILL NOT BE ACCEPTING ANY MORE PERSONAL CHECKS. Another warns against siphoning gasoline from the village fire truck.

Still, like many of Alaska's native villages, Shishmaref clings to its subsistence culture. The town supports 10 dog teams, and a local musher, Herbie Nayokpuk, is known statewide as the Shishmaref Cannonball for his top-place finishes in the Iditarod race. Walrus-tusk carving is taught in school, along with the Inupiaq language. And if the town itself is ugly, it is balanced by the desolate beauty of the slate-colored sea, the ducks flying in formation over the lagoon and the musk ox roaming in emerald meadows dotted with wild cotton. Some two-thirds of the local diet still derives from hunting and fishing. In the diamond light of late summer, whole families forage for salmonberries, which the elders eat mixed with grated caribou fat. ("Eskimo ice cream," they call it.) The kids prefer it with Cool Whip.

"This is our grocery store," says Tony Weyiouanna, pulling shimmering white fish from his gill net.

But up and down Alaska's coast, alarm is spreading that the natural bounty on which the culture is built is at risk. At Point Hope, a bowhead-whaling village that dates from 600 B.C., flooding seawater threatens the airport runway and a seven-mile evacuation road. "During storms, people begin to panic," says town official Rex Rock. In the Pribilof Islands, villagers blame global warming along with industrial contaminants for the decline of 20 species, ranging from kelp to sea lion. In Barrow, capital of the oil-rich North Slope Borough, sandbags and dredging haven't protected $500 million in infrastructure. "We are at a crossroads," says Mayor Edith Vorderstrasse. "Is it practical to stand and fight our Mother Ocean? Or do we surrender and move?"

The prospect of relocating whole Eskimo villages--global warming's first American refugees--is gathering political support. Last January, Shishmaref citizens voted to move to a site called Tin Creek, 12 miles away, across a lagoon. And last June, Alaska's powerful Senator, Appropriations Committee Chairman Ted Stevens, convened federal, state and local officials for a two-day hearing in Anchorage to hear impassioned pleas from village leaders who want help repairing their infrastructure or relocating. Among the most eloquent was Eningowuk, 54, a mother of six who heads the Shishmaref Erosion and Relocation Coalition. "Shishmaref is where it is because of what the ocean, rivers, streams and the land provide to us," she testified. "We are hunters, and we are gatherers. We have been here for countless generations. We value our way of life. It provides for our very existence."

But moving Shishmaref to a more protected location could be prohibitively expensive, especially given the high cost of building in the Arctic. When the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers looked at relocating Kivalina, a nearby village of 380 people, the price tag was $100 million to $400 million--roughly $1 million for each resident.

And it wouldn't necessarily stop there. A recent Government Accountability Office (GAO) study found four villages, including Shishmaref, to be in "imminent danger" and 20 others to have serious problems. Overall, 184 out of 213 Alaska native villages face some flooding and erosion, the GAO report noted, although how much is due to global warming and how much to the natural movement of rivers and coasts is uncertain.

Although most Shishmaref residents want to relocate, they also are worried about moving inland. Nayokpuk fears that the cost of living will double if fuel has to be transported over land. And Stanley Tocktoo, the vice mayor, says that it will be harder to dig the ice cellars the villagers use for fermenting their meat in the mud beneath the Tin Creek site than it was in Shishmaref's sand. As his son Harvey, 11, watches a Jackie Chan movie and picks fermented-walrus morsels off his father's plate, Tocktoo reflects that the farther away the village has to move from the ocean, the more trouble it will be "to get access to all this good food."

An expensive precedent may be set here. If global warming ever begins washing away coastal towns in the rest of the U.S., the cost of mass relocations would be unimaginable. But Shishmaref's villagers are adamant about their need to stay together, and they greet with horror any suggestion that they be dispersed to Nome or Kotzebue. The village--where everyone knows everyone else's name, and everyone is more or less related to everyone else--must relocate as a whole, or it would be the "annihilation of our community by dissemination," says Eningowuk. Whatever the solution, the Inupiaq are looking for it to be paid for by the folks who sent them global warming in the first place. And who would that be? "The Nalauqmiu--white people," says Eningowuk with a rueful smile.