Flames were leaping out of the forest beneath the float plane taking us deep into the remote interior of northern Alaska. Our destination was the glacial Walker Lake, which stretches 14 miles through Gates of the Arctic National Park.
Nearly 100 miles from the nearest dirt road, Walker Lake is within an expanse of uninhabited tundra, scraggly boreal forests and the seemingly endless peaks of the Brooks Range in a wilderness bigger than Belgium. Once we arrived, we saw wide bear trails bulldozed through alder thickets and plentiful signs of moose and wolves.
We had come here to begin a 500-mile journey that would take us in pack rafts down the Noatak River, believed to be the longest undeveloped river system left in the United States, and on foot, slogging the beaches of the Chukchi Sea coastline. Our goal was to get a close-up look at how warming temperatures are affecting this rugged but fragile Arctic landscape. Worldwide, roughly twice the amount of the heat-trapping carbon now in the atmosphere has been locked away in the planet’s higher latitudes in frozen ground known as permafrost. Now that ground is thawing and releasing its greenhouse gases.
The fire we flew over was our first visible sign of the changes underway.
While wildfires are part of the landscape’s natural regenerative cycle, they have until recently been infrequent above the Arctic Circle. But now the rising heat of the lengthening summers has dried out the tundra and the invasive shrubs that have recently moved north with the warmth. This is a tinderbox for lightning strikes. The fires expose and defrost the frozen soil, allowing greenhouse gases to escape into the atmosphere.
I have slept more than 1,000 nights on frozen terrain while exploring the Far North. My first Arctic venture was in 1983, with a fellow National Park Service ranger in a tandem kayak on the Noatak River in Gates of the Arctic. We awoke one morning, startled by the sounds of a big animal running through low willows. It jumped into the river straight toward our tent — a caribou chased by a wolf. We were relieved it wasn’t a bear.
I couldn’t help but feel unsettled, even reduced, by the immense sky and landscape. While the scale of it all seemed too much to process, the Arctic had captured my soul and I set out on numerous other trips across different places in the North.
More than 30 years passed before I returned to the Noatak with my son in 2021, for a weeklong float trip on the river. I was shocked to see how climate change had transformed the Noatak’s headwaters. As I wrote in a guest essay for Times Opinion later that year, the warming climate had radically altered the place I once knew.
I returned a year later with the photographer Chris Korbulic, one of the world’s most accomplished expedition kayakers, to document in a book how climate change was upending the region and the lives of its villagers.
Migrations of fish, mammals and birds have shifted as temperatures rise. Sea ice has diminished; without that protection, storms are eroding shorelines and flooding villages. Forests are following the warmer conditions north; so are animals new to the Arctic. The permafrost is thawing and wildfires ignited by lightning sweep across dry tundra.
We had read about all this. Now we were witnessing it.
We saw only one caribou along the Noatak; in 1983, I had seen hundreds. The western Arctic herd has declined by two-thirds since the early 2000s. The changing climate is thought to be at least partially responsible.
We found even more landslides along the river than I had seen the previous summer with my son. The high banks give way as the permafrost thaws. One was as wide as a football field. Water from the ancient frozen ground sloshed into the aqua-blue Noatak River, turning it ashen gray.
In the Brooks Range, streams actually have been turning orange from oxidized iron over the past decade as permafrost thaws. High levels of other metals have also been found in the streams, leaching from permafrost into the water, damaging fisheries and threatening water supplies downstream.
Welcome to Arctic Alaska.
As we continued, midway down the Noatak we compared century-old photographs of treeless tundra to what we were seeing now in the same place: a changed landscape of shrubs and willows in a region warming nearly four times faster than the rest of the planet.
We were startled by a beaver’s percussive tail-slap in the water. Fifty years ago, there were no beavers in the Arctic. Then, in the 1980s, the growth of woody shrubs and trees that provide food and dam material drew them in. By 2019, more than 11,000 beaver ponds were counted in northwestern Alaska. The ponds act as a heat source that melts the permafrost, inundates tundra vegetation and changes the flow of streams.
We reached the isolated inland village of Noatak — population: 536 — which sits alongside its namesake river, and were warmly welcomed by the Iñupiat, who have inhabited this region for thousands of years and are alarmed by the state of climate affairs. Frequent river floods have washed away a road, exposed an old landfill and threatened the airstrip that serves as their primary supply line. But this is only the beginning, because scientists expect more frequent extreme rain and snow as temperatures increase and oceans warm. Houses and a water treatment plant that weren’t built on jacks have begun to slump into the soggy ground.
One of our hosts, the elder Thurston Booth, told us, “The willows came about ten years ago” and “we just can’t figure out how they got so big.” The cornucopia of berries that long provided sustenance have dried up locally and can only be found out along the coast, requiring a long boat ride — an expensive proposition with scarce gasoline that was selling for $18 a gallon at the time. When I had asked a villager, sweating in the heat, what could be done about climate change, he replied, “Maybe people down south could reduce their emissions.”
From Noatak we caught a boat ride down the river and out into the Chukchi Sea to Kotzebue, 26 miles north of the Arctic Circle. This town of some 3,000 people, mostly Iñupiat, sits on a spit of sand and gravel that juts into the sea. The average annual air temperature there has risen more than three degrees — nearly seven degrees in the winter — over the past 75 years.
Chris and I visited the writer and commercial fisherman Seth Kantner, who was raised by his parents in a wilderness sod home. Mr. Kantner told us about the recent decline of the caribou herd and wondered if the salmon, too, would diminish. They used to be seasonally predictable migrants essential to Arctic peoples’ subsistence lives. Their appearances are no longer predictable.
Our trek north took us another 80 miles along the Chukchi Sea coastline. We broke trail through deep sand thrown up by storms. Compared to previous decades, the sea ice that protects the shore from storms is melting earlier in the spring and forming later in the fall. This has led to storm surges that can cleave away shoreline and inundate villages. We saw several Iñupiat hunting cabins destroyed by them.
We saw more than a few sea birds dead on the shore, having likely starved as the sea creatures they eat were forced deeper into the colder waters they prefer in a warming ocean. It took us a week to reach the island village of Kivalina, arriving hobbled from dragging a sled and cart through the deep sands. This excursion wasn’t what we expected; in past years the beaches were compacted and mostly protected from storms by ice.
Standing atop the six-foot-high sea wall that provides scant protection to the 450 or so residents of Kivalina, you can feel the precariousness of this Iñupiat community’s existence. It sits on a barrier island on the Chukchi Sea. Kivalina is not an outlier. More than 70 of over 200 Alaska Native coastal villages face significant threats from erosion, flooding and thawing permafrost. Kivalina residents, in fact, are hoping to relocate the entire village, one of at least 12 communities seeking to move to safer ground.
We returned home wondering what to do about a problem so monumental and consequential. A crisis, rather than mere climate change. As always, we believe that taking action begins with voting for candidates who support efforts to end greenhouse gas emissions. We must rethink our lives as fossil fuel consumers and reduce our carbon output, support legislation to relocate threatened villages, keep up with the science and be evermore vocal about our concerns.
In August, two years after I had met with Mr. Kantner, he emailed me to say that the salmon had not returned to Kotzebue. For decades, his summer salmon earnings ranged from $5,000 to $40,000, but by the time the fishing season ended in August 2024, he wrote, “I sold nine fish for $31.”
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