Dustin Whalen, a physical scientist who has been tracking the region’s coastal erosion with Natural Resources Canada (NRCan) for 15 years, was one of the four researchers on the shore who blinked and missed the cliff collapse last August. One in a string of outer islands in the Mackenzie River Delta, Pelly is perhaps the fastest disappearing island on the planet. One of the questions scientists are trying to answer is whether the Arctic might be turning from a carbon sink into a carbon emitter - essentially, whether what happens in the Arctic stays in the Arctic. The bigger, global threat of permafrost thaw is the potential transformation of previously frozen organic matter into greenhouse gases that could further heat the planet. And while these local cataclysms may feel distant to southerners, their impact has worldwide repercussions. In the past decade alone, the Arctic has warmed by 0.75 degrees Celsius the Earth as a whole has warmed by at least 0.8 degrees - over the past 140 years. Heavy fossil-fuel use at more southerly latitudes, mainly in North America, China and Europe, is driving the generation of human-made greenhouse gases, and the western Arctic and sub-Arctic are heating up twice as fast as the global average. The climate crisis is even seen by some as a form of environmental racism - a problem created down south and suffered up north. It produces sinkholes and triggers landslides capable of altering the topography and tilting houses. It drives storm surges, washes out roads and clogs rivers with sediments. Susan Nerberg A scientist sets a ground marker before launching a drone to track changes on Pelly Island, which is in danger of disappearing into the Beaufort Sea.įor people living in the Arctic, climate change is hacking away at their foundation. As permafrost scientist Steve Kokelj of the Northwest Territories Geological Survey put it to me over the phone before I headed north in August 2019 to witness these dramatic changes, “When permafrost thaws, we’re losing the glue that holds the landscape together.” But the frozen ground that since the last ice age has propped up the land of the Inuvialuit and the Gwich’in peoples in this vast region is thawing, leaving open wounds on the tundra and crumbling cliffs on the coast. Many of us living far from the lacy coastline of the Beaufort Sea are a bit like the sandhill cranes, however: too distant to hear the roar of fragmenting land masses, too distracted to grasp the unravelling of the western Arctic. If the catastrophic erosion of Pelly Island is an indication, climate change smells like brimstone and sounds like fury. But the sandhill cranes didn’t seem to notice, continuing their calls amid the rumble from the falling cliff. The massive block of frozen mud and ice toppled so fast a group of scientists working nearby on the island’s shore didn’t have a chance to yell “Holy crap!” before it bombed the Beaufort Sea. About 500 metres from their tundra nest on Pelly Island in the Northwest Territories, a chunk of cliff four storeys high crashed into the ocean, sending the odour of broken earth and sulphur into the spray. The sandhill cranes were obliviousto the destruction. Permafrost Thaw in the Warming Arctic: Final Remarks.Infrastructure and Community Resilience in the Changing Arctic: Status, Challenges, and Research Needs.Climate Change and Geopolitics: Monitoring of a Thawing Permafrost.North but Maybe Not North Enough: Adapting Sub-Arctic Communities and Infrastructure to a Changing Climate.Reducing Individual Costs of Permafrost Thaw Damage in Canada’s Arctic. Meltdown – The Permafrost that Holds the Arctic Together is Falling Apart.The Global Carbon Budget and Permafrost Feedback Loops in the Arctic.Drunken Forests: Teaching About Permafrost Thaw Through Personal Experience.Agents and the Arctic: The Case for Increased Use of Agent-Based Modeling to Study Permafrost.The Arctic Institute Permafrost Series 2021 But before, check out the seven articles from our first installment, starting with the Intro. The second installment of our series features eight new articles on permafrost degradation and its effects on Arctic life, research, and the world at large. To examine the effects of permafrost degradation, and increase our understanding of what this phenomenon means for the future of the region (and the world), The Arctic Institute’s new two-part permafrost series aims to analyze the topic from scientific, security, legal, and personal perspectives. Permafrost thaw is one of the world’s most pressing climate problems, already disrupting lifestyles, livelihoods, economies, and ecosystems in the north, and threatening to spill beyond the boundaries of the Arctic as our planet continues to warm. Noella Cockney’s house (center) in Tuktoyaktuk, the day after a storm in August 2019 that clawed away three feet of the eroding shoreline.
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