Ecosystem shifts, glacial flooding and ‘rusting rivers’ among Alaska impacts in Arctic report

NOAA’s 2025 report comes despite Trump administration cuts to climate science research and projects

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration issued its annual Arctic Report Card on Tuesday, which documents the way rising temperatures, diminished ice, thawing permafrost, melting glaciers and vegetation shifts are transforming the region and affecting its people. The agency has released the report for 20 years as a way to track changes in the Arctic.

“The Arctic continues to warm faster than the global average, with the 10 years that comprise the last decade marking the 10 warmest years on record,” Steve Thur, NOAA’s acting administrator for oceanic and atmospheric research and the agency’s acting chief scientist, said at a news conference Tuesday.

The report card is a peer-reviewed collaboration of more than 100 scientists from 13 countries, with numerous coauthors from the University of Alaska Fairbanks. It was officially released at the American Geophysical Union’s annual meeting in New Orleans, where Thur and other officials held the news conference.

The report is the first under the second Trump administration, at a time when the federal government’s commitment to documenting Arctic climate change has diminished: The president has repeatedly called climate change a hoax and federal departments are cancelling climate change-related research and projects, as well as scrubbing climate information from public view.

Under directives from the Trump administration, NOAA no longer provides information that the National Snow and Ice Data Center once used to monitor sea ice and snow cover, for example. The Colorado-based center now relies on satellite information from the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency for its sea ice reports, and it has reduced its analysis.

A national dataset about the melt of the Greenland Ice Sheet has also been lost to the Trump administration’s cutbacks, said Rick Thoman of the UAF’s Alaska Center for Climate Assessment and Preparedness, one of the report’s main editors. The ice sheet is still being monitored by European satellites, but the data is not equivalent, he said.

Government entities like NOAA’s Alaska Fisheries Science Center, which regularly provides scientific information that goes into the Arctic Report Card, have endured deep budget cuts and staff firings.

On Tuesday, Russel Vought, President Donald Trump’s Office of Management and Budget Director, said the administration plans to close the National Center for Atmospheric Research, a Colorado research facility that has operated since 1960. The facility “is one of the largest sources of climate alarmism in the country,” Vought said in a post on the social media site X.

And this year, unlike the other years since 2006 when NOAA published the first Arctic Report Card, the agency declined to issue a news release about it.

Thur, asked if NOAA will continue to publish report cards in the future, said the agency will continue the work that goes into the annual documents.

“What I would say in response to that question, is that we’re here today and that we have released the 2025 version,” he said. NOAA has continued its long-term environmental observations in the Arctic, both with satellite observations, he said. “So I think one of the things that the community can rely upon is that our efforts to continue to observe the planet will remain present,” he said.

Thur also demurred when asked whether NOAA still stands by the statements about fossil fuels made by the agency’s prior administrator, Rick Spinrad. When last year’s report was issued at the end of the Biden administration, Spinrad said the changes in the Arctic were directly related to fossil-fuel emissions. Thur did not mention fossil fuels.

“What I would say in response to that question is that we recognize that the planet is changing dramatically,” he said during the news conference. “Our role within NOAA is to try to predict what’s going to occur in the future by documenting what’s occurring today,” he said. “There is a human role, as our administrator currently, Dr. Neil Jacobs, said during his congressional confirmation hearing, for humans in influencing those changes.”

Matthew Druckenmiller of the National Snow and Ice Data Center, another lead editor of the report, made no such equivocations.

“Let us start by first acknowledging that the warming of our planet driven by human greenhouse gas emissions into our atmosphere is amplified in the Arctic,” he said near the start of the news conference. “The Arctic continues to warm much faster than the globe overall, amplified by the loss of reflective sea ice and snow, causing more of the sun’s heat to penetrate into land and ocean.”

Druckenmiller also said the Trump administration did not interfere with drafting of the report.

“I can say that in producing the Arctic report card in 2025, we did not receive any political interference with our results,” he said.

Lower sea ice, more  precipitation, more melt and thaw

Some of the main messages in this report concern superlatives, while others describe a continuation of long-term changes.

It was the Arctic’s hottest year in a record dating back to 1900, the report said. The past year’s winter sea ice maximum was the lowest in the satellite record, which dates back to the late 1970s, and sea ice is much thinner and younger than it was in the past, the report said.

The region set a record for precipitation for the 12 months that ended in September, despite an unusually dry summer in parts of northern Canada and Eurasia. Warmer air holds more moisture, and a long-term trend of higher precipitation continues, the report said.

Across the Arctic, June snow cover extent has declined by 50% over the past six decades, since the 1960s. “Even though you’re starting out in season with more snow, it’s melting faster,” Thoman said.

For rain, there is another pattern: more heavy rain events. Those included last January’s powerful, northward pushing “atmospheric river” that stretched from the Aleutian Islands through mainland Alaska, bringing midwinter rain and flood conditions to Anchorage and elsewhere.

Alaska figures prominently in this year’s report card, as it has in past years’ reports.

One chapter is devoted to changing conditions in the Northern Bering Sea and the Chukchi Sea, where a warming-related process termed “borealization” is ongoing. That refers to the transition from an Arctic ecosystem to a more southern ecosystem.

In both seas, the report said, boreal species ranging from commercially important fish like Alaska pollock and Pacific cod to tiny organisms that make up the base of the food web, have been pushing out the more cold-adapted Arctic species like Arctic cod, saffron cod and snow crab. There are impacts to people and marine mammals, the report noted.

“Warming temperatures, declining sea ice, and shifting productivity in the Chukchi and northern Bering Seas drive ecosystem changes with significant implications for fisheries, food security, and Indigenous subsistence,” the report said.

In both seas, about a third of the boreal species groups examined over time increased, while about a third of the Arctic species groups decreased. Some of those boreal species populations spiked in recent years. That long-term trend is evident despite a lot of year-to-year variation and anomalously cold conditions in the Chukchi over the past year.

A chapter about mountain glaciers, a major contributor to global sea level rise, highlights this summer’s glacial outburst flood in Juneau, a phenomenon that has become an annual occurrence in Alaska’s capital city. Glacial outburst floods are increasing in frequency and severity in certain parts of the Arctic and subarctic, said Gabriel Wolken of UAF at the news conference.

Glacial melt is also tied to another extreme event that happened this summer in Southeast Alaska: the collapse of a mountainside along narrow Tracy Arm, which generated a local tsunami that rose nearly 1,600 feet up the opposite side.

“Glacier retreat combined with slope instability can lead to landslides,” Wolken said, adding that those slides can lead to far-reaching tsunamis. “The August 10th, 2025 landslide in Southeast Alaska’s Tracey Arm illustrates the sheer power of these hazards,” he said.

A chapter in the report is devoted to “rusting rivers,” a permafrost-related phenomenon documented throughout the Arctic but especially in Northwestern Alaska. The name comes from the conversion of clear streams to rust-colored waterways, the product of iron and other chemicals that leech out from rocks because of permafrost thaw. There are more than 200 such rusting watersheds in Alaska, said Abagael Pruitt, a University of California, Davis scientist studying the subject.

Another chapter in the report describes the Indigenous science monitoring being done at the community level. That includes work by the Aleut Community of St. Paul Island, a tribal government that has established its own lab to screen traditional foods for mercury contents.

While much of the report was devoted to impacts within the Arctic and to people living in the region, its coauthors pointed out that rapid climate change in the far north affects latitudes far to the south. Sea level rise, disrupted weather patterns and shocks to commercial fisheries that are important global food sources are among the far-ranging effects of melt, thaw and other changes, they said.

Wolken, at the news conference, put it this way:

“From the deep oceans to the highest peaks, the Arctic cryosphere is undergoing rapid, interconnected and unprecedented change, and those changes matter far beyond the Arctic.”