Inuits warn of melting permafrost in Russia

"Their Sky Has Changed!" Inuit elders sharing information with NASA as Canadian Alaskan and Russian permafrost is thawing at an alarming rate

Photo ktoo.org

the Big Wobble,

3 October, 2017

Climate change is thawing the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta's permafrost, and it's doing more than cracking foundations, sinking roads and accelerating erosion.

In villages like Kong, communities have stopped burying their dead because, as the permafrost melts, the oldest part of their cemetery is sinking.

Digging graves in the soggy ground were just making it worse.

Tribal Administrator Roland Andrew guided me through the cemetery.

The white crosses stick out of the sunken ground at odd angles, some of them almost completely submerged in the brackish water.

"After we dug down 6 feet, it created a lake around it," Andrew said.

The swamp appeared about 10 or 15 years ago and then expanded, swallowing the graves around it. The graveyard in the neighbouring village of Kwigillingok, or Kwig, is also sinking into swampland. After consulting with Kwig's elders for advice, Andrew said that Kong started laying its loved ones to rest in boxes above ground.

Digging into the ground removes the plants and topsoil that insulate the permafrost and accelerates the rising water.

Andrew said that the swamp stopped expanding when Kong stopped burying its dead, but a row of white grave boxes from about a decade ago are teetering at odd angles, sliding feet-first into the lake. The water is still causing problems.

The hill that the village stands on is slowly slipping down to sea level.
"This hill used to be high," he said. "And it's still going down."

He doesn't see Kong relocating.

If anything, he said, Kong's population might double in size in the future.
Community members in Kwig are talking about moving there because of the seasonal flooding. Andrew wants to be buried next to his parents; he keeps a picture of them above his desk.

They died last year within about eight months of each other after being married for over 60 years. Their grave boxes still smell like fresh paint and are wreathed in plastic flowers, propped up on blocks on the cemetery's highest ground, at least for now.

Warped roads sinking buildings eroding river banks, slanting spruce trees as permafrost in Bethal Alaska is deteriorating and shrinking Permafrost in and around Bethel is deteriorating and shrinking, even more quickly than most places in Alaska.

Since the first buildings out here, people have struggled with the freeze and thaw of the soils above the permafrost.

Now those challenges are amplified. "What they are saying is the permafrost is dying," said Eric Whitney, a home inspector and energy auditor in Bethel who has noticed newly eroding river banks, slanting spruce trees and homes shifting anew just weeks after being made level.

"I'm just assuming it is not coming back while we're around here."

Engineers designing new buildings and roads battle complex forces of nature in dealing with permafrost thaw.

One big project - addressing what appear as fierce frost heaves on Chief Eddie Hoffman Highway, one of the main roads through town - is still short on answers.

In the wild, boggy lands of the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta, a tundra blanket naturally insulates ice-rich permafrost.

But in much of Bethel and surrounding villages, that blanket is long gone.

"When you lose the tundra, you lose your insulation," said Mike Salzbrun, owner of foundation and geotechnical contractor Salzbrun Services and Drilling, with decades of experience on the Y-K Delta. Permafrost here is considered "warm," maybe a fraction of a degree below freezing, so it's sensitive to just a slight warming of the air, said Vladimir Romanovsky, geophysics professor and permafrost researcher at the University of Alaska Fairbanks.

Known as 'The end of the world' by Russian locals nearly 10,000 ground bubbles containing methane 1,000 times higher than surrounding air about to explode in Siberia