In villages like Kongiganak, communities have stopped burying their dead because, as the permafrost melts, the oldest part of their cemetery is sinking.
The United States’ northernmost city plummeted to a bone-chilling minus 20 degrees Wednesday morning, beating out the previous daily record set in 1973.
Kivalina residents report cracks on the sides of the recently built evacuation road which connects the village to the storm refuge site and the school. The team with the Alaska Department of Transportation & Public Facilities plans to visit the village and assess the damages at the end of August.
Drained lake basins make up more than half of the Arctic coastal plain, but the complete drainage of a lake is rarely witnessed by people.
The average temperature in July was 48.4 degrees — 6.7 degrees above normal, with 11 hot days in a row. Such extreme warmth can accelerate the greening and permafrost thaw on the North Slope.
In Utqiaġvik, where the coast is eroding at some of the fastest rates in the nation, storms, flooding and thawing permafrost damage houses, roads and cultural sites. Ice forms later each year and storms are becoming longer and more severe.
The incident appears similar to an oil and gas release in 2017 blamed on thawing permafrost and hot production fluids.
Transportation engineers moved the road to avoid a giant mass of frozen debris sliding downhill.
The wildfires can burrow into rich organic material, such as the vast peatlands that ring the Arctic, and smolder under the snowpack throughout the frigid winter.
When 200 million metric tons of rock tumbled down a remote Southeast Alaska mountain in October, nobody was around to see it. But thanks to a beefed-up seismic network and a new system that can distinguish landslides from earthquakes, scientists knew it had happened.
Alaskas tundra landscapes carpet a good portion of the state, from the North Slope to the elbow of the Alaska Peninsula. Researchers say it's slowly sinking in places -- as much as a fifth of an inch each year.
In northern Alaska, an amphitheater of frozen ground thaws where a northern river cuts into it, exposing walls of ice. The feature, known by scientists as “yedoma,” is the largest of its kind yet found in Alaska. A great wall of ice holds a lot of treasures from the past, which science is eager to explore.
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