Battered, but not yet broken: Coastal Alaska abides in the grip of global heating
Recent headlines about the vortex of the expired Typhoon Halong destroying two Native settlements, severely damaging another dozen or so, and displacing 1,500 villagers in western Alaska put that region into the limelight. But storms pounding the American mainland where it faces Siberia are no rarity.
The people of Nome, on the Bering Strait’s Seward Peninsula, long have borne witness to atmospheric mayhem. A Big One, in 1913, “ripped up the cemetery and swept away some coffins with bodies, scattering them over the plains in the vicinity.” Beer barrels bobbed in the middle of Front Street like so many booze buoys; a piano washed up at the cape thirteen miles to the east. Nome’s 2011 “blizzicane” spewed sea foam onto Front Street and shook Icy View subdivision homes elevated above permafrost on the heights north of town, making the water in toilet bowls hiccup. It drove thirty-foot waves inland in an 8.6-foot surge.
That 2011 storm rivaled the howler of 1974, the strongest in Nome’s annals, which overwhelmed the riprap sea wall of quarried stone with a thirteen-foot rise bearing driftwood, flooding low-lying areas. A contender had hit in September 1900, at the peak of the gold rush, unhousing 1,000 miners.
While the frequency and intensity of fall and winter storms have increased over the past decades—due to sea levels rising and increased moisture from evaporation and the strait remaining ice-free longer now before the onset of winter—it may be difficult to link individual cataclysms to global heating. Some facts and trends are indisputable, though. According to NOAA, the lowest maximum sea-ice extent along the eastern Bering Sea sector of the continental shelf occurred in 2018; and this does not account for the ice thinning as well. Record-breaking warm ocean temperatures followed in 2019. Later years, including 2023 and 2025, saw below-average ice cover. In some places with rising water temperatures ice forms about a month later. Offshore, wind patterns too have been changing. And fish species have shifted their ranges northward.
The 2019 minimum tied for second lowest with 2007 and 2016, affecting the Native spring bowhead whaling dependent on frozen launch and landing pads along the shore. This is “shorefast” ice, tuvaq in the Inupiaq language, temporarily moored to land, unlike the floating “pack” farther out. Floes in the strait also serve walrus as diving platforms from which they propel their elephantine bodies to the seafloor to harvest clams. With that ice absent, the animals congregate on shore by the hundreds, starving, as do the people depending on them. Industry’s noxious exhalations on the Chukchi Sea coast between North America’s northernmost city Utqiaġvik (formerly: Barrow) and Nuvuk (Point Barrow, the tip of a spit) narrowed windows by shrinking stronger multiyear ice. Here, the temperature since 1921 has climbed 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit, over twice the average rate. A six-degree worldwide increase would herald utter mayhem.
Western Alaska’s indigenous peoples—the Inupiat and neighboring Yup’ik—have been expert at survival and adaptation, a legacy of centuries of residence on that tumultuous coast. But even their knowledge no longer holds true. Snowmachine riders have gone missing, drifted out to sea or drowned trying to water-skip across an abyssal open-water “lead.” During a 1997 rupture, helicopters rescued 142 whalers after a 20-mile ripping seam bared inky water. Smaller floes in such circumstances become stepping-stones in a deadly game of subsistence hopscotch. “Ice may be beautiful but it’s immensely dangerous,” says Phyllis Stabeno, a physical oceanographer at NOAA’s Pacific Marine Environmental Lab. “It’s nature. It’s powerful, and you have to treat it with respect. A lot of respect.”
Ironically, a warming trend prompted whaling’s first flourishing in the region. Around 900 CE, the Thule people began chasing agvik—the bowhead whale—through ice-free straits. For the first time in those tightfisted latitudes, single forays fed whole villages. Tracing bowhead migrations from the Bering Sea to Greenland beyond present Inupiaq homelands, these kayaking proto-Inuit forged the Arctic’s dominant, most refined marine-mammal-centered culture.
Since 2007, engineering savvy has enhanced the safety of land-based whalers on the southern Beaufort Sea coast. Geophysicists from the Boulder, Colorado, National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) institute, partnering with the University of Alaska Fairbanks, the Whaling Captains Association and Native village corporations, inspect coastal ice annually. They measure its thickness with an instrument sled a snowmachine hauls over each trail section. Capitalizing on the fact that saltwater conducts electricity while ice doesn’t, the device creates an electromagnetic field and reads the strength of a resulting secondary field, sensing the vertical distance between the instrument and water. A weak rebound signal spells equanimity, a strong one, trouble. The team charts trails by GPS and collates the information with radar satellite imagery of jumbled or even ice. Hunters consult paper and digital versions of these maps off and on.
Quantification and modern technology may save lives, especially now that the old ice wisdom fits the climate’s crazy slant less.
“The world is faster now,” Yup’ik and Inupiaq elders say apropos of traumatic environmental change, as if our planet were an overwound clock. We should heed their warning, since it’s the proverbial tip of an iceberg headed toward us.
Longtime wilderness guide Michael Engelhard is the author, most recently, of No Place Like Nome: The Bering Strait Seen Through Its Most Storied City. Engelhard was trained as an anthropologist and lived in Nome for several years.
