It’s the return of an annual erosion nightmare for Alaskans living in barrier island villages along the Chukchi Sea. Once again, Shishmaref faces another storm with potential to consume more its diminishing beach.
A legacy of the 2007 record meltback of sea ice, a vast expanse of open ocean now stretches for hundreds of miles off Alaska’s Northwest coast. (See the current sea ice analysis.) The relatively warm fall weather has not built shore-fast shelves of ice that could armor the beaches from surf. Add in a 40 mph north gusts and the possibility of 12-foot waves against exposed permafrost of the beach bluffs — and Shishmaref may suffer yet more damage to a sea wall intended to buy time until the village can move to a safer location.
“Everybody’s kind of anxious, but we’ll just have to see what the storm does, I guess,” said Tony Weyiouanna, Shishmaref’s transportation planner, told the Anchorage Daily News in a story published Thursday. “This is supposed to be one of the worst storms so far for this year.”
This latest fall storm — spawned by a tropical depression that slammed into Southeast Alaska and built an immense cyclonic system over Alaska — is another example of the kind of intractable problems facing rural Alaskans living in isolated locales close to the sea.
At least 184 of Alaska’s 213 villages face significant erosion and flooding, often (though not always) due to changing climate, according to a 2003 report by the U.S. General Accountability Office. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers plans to study 60 villages thought to have the worst problems and has closely examined 10 communities with the worst outlook: Kivalina, Shishmaref, Newtok, Bethel, Dillingham, Kaktovik, Unalakleet, Point Hope, Koyukuk and Barrow.
“We’ve got a very slow-moving disaster,” said U.S. Army Corps senior planner Bruce Sexauer told me for a story I wrote that appeared in Alaska Magazine. “I’ve been out there during some of the higher wind events, and you can get the sense that you’re looking down the barrel of a cannon . . . nothing but ocean. And you’re standing on an island made of sand.”
Source: NCDC
The unprecedented meltback of sea during summer 2007 made this difficult situation far worse. Ice cover near Alaska remained at incredibly low levels through the end of October, according to a report posted online this week by the National Climate Data Center.
The October 2007 Northern Hemisphere sea ice extent, which is measured from passive microwave instruments onboard NOAA satellites, was below the 1979-2000 mean and was the least sea ice extent on record for the month of October.
Sea ice extent for October has decreased at a rate of 5.5 percent/decade (since satellite records began in 1979) as temperatures in the high latitude Northern Hemisphere have risen at a rate of approximately 0.37 °C/decade over the same period.
With such an unprecedented fetch lending power to any wind, a storm earlier this fall prompted residents of Kivalina to evacuate, when the meteorologists warned that there could be coastal flooding during a high tide accompanied by surge. About 50 villagers remained behind to fill sand bags and keep the sea wall from getting destroyed, according to a story in the Anchorage Daily News. But the village dodged the bullet with minimal damage.
Now it’s Shishmaref’s turn. Here’s another take on the situation as seas build, from a story posted online by KTUU’s Sean Doogan.
No one has a more immediate interest in the approaching waves than the Kokeoks, whose home is the last one left on the old rock wall’s edge. That wall has already succumbed to the sea.
“Wore down everything the ocean wore down a lot of ground out there,” Sheldon Kokeok said. “Like I say we are only about 40 to 50 feet from that wall.”
Despite hundreds of tons of rock, nothing can withstand the relentless changing of seasons here, residents say. Change has come quickly to Shishmaref.
“Maybe (if) it was 20 years ago it would be pretty cold, the ocean ice out there would be solid by now and the temperature would probably be 15 to 20 below,” Kokeok said.