From Beneath Us It Devours: The Implications of Thawing Permafrost for Indigenous Communities

On Nov. 12, 2020, I talked about the implications of thawing permafrost for indigenous communities on Cimpatico's adaptation channel. 

(Jump to Cimpatico's description of itself at the bottom of this post.)

(Jump to my explanation of how I ended up talking about this topic on Cimpatico.)

You can see the interview on the Cimpatico platform here. You have to create a free account to get access.

Or, see it on Youtube.

It's 26 minutes, and with that time constraint I didn't get to talk about a lot of things I wanted to talk about. So, I'm going to make this post a parking lot of resources for people who want to learn more about this topic.

"Permafrost in the Northern Hemisphere" by GRIDArendal (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

What Is Permafrost?

Permafrost is soil, sediment, or rock that remains at or below 0 C for at least two consecutive years. (R. Wray, Indigenous Peoples' Atlas of Canada).

Permafrost is part of the "cryosphere" -- the parts of the Earth where water is found in the forms of ice and snow. The cryosphere includes sea ice, lake ice, river ice, snow cover, glaciers, ice sheets, ice caps, and the places where the ground is frozen, including permafrost. (See NOAA's cryosphere page.)

Why Do Scientists Think it is Thawing?

Evidence of thawing permafrost extends back 60 years. A study showed that "significant degradation" of permafrost has occurred since 1964 along the Alaska Highway corridor in Canada (the southern Yukon and northern BC area): it appears permafrost has retreated northward by "at least" 25 kilometers (James et al. 2013).

What Are the Primary Impacts of Thawing Permafrost?

The primary impact of thawing permafrost is the loss of natural infrastructure, which causes a long list of secondary impacts that destabilize systems that socio-economic systems depend on. This includes destabilization of roads, buildings, chilling facilities (especially for food), sewage and garbage containment systems, coastal land through erosion, and burial grounds (see the 2017 NPR piece "Cemeteries Turn To Swamps As Alaska's Permafrost Melts"). Also, there is a threat to clean water from thawing permafrost. Some communities depend on fresh water from lakes contained by permafrost (thermokarst lakes), and as the containment strength of the permafrost weakens, the community might slowly or suddenly lose its fresh water source. In August 2016, the Alaskan village of Point Lay lost its fresh water source suddenly when ground ice separating its reservoir from an adjacent river thawed, draining the reservoir (Trochim & Schuur 2018).

Other health-related impacts of thawing permafrost are the release of pollutants such as mercury from the permafrost (see the 2015 Barents Observer piece "Arctic Mercury Pollution To Increase as Permafrost Thaws"), and the re-awakening of long-dormant diseases such as anthrax (see the 2016 Barents Observer piece "Scientist: Yamal anthrax outbreak could just be the beginning"). A Nov. 20, 2020, article in Scientific American raises the alarm about "the potential risks from the resurrection of ancient and poorly described viral genomes" (pointing to Ng et al. 2014, discussing the reanimation of a 700-year-old caribou virus from a permanent ice patch).

Also, there is the release of additional greenhouse gases into the atmosphere from thawing permafrost, creating a feedback loop that will speed up climate change, with particularly vicious immediate feedbacks into the Arctic's warming. Thawing permafrost is releasing the powerful greenhouse gas methane, which bubbles to the surface in Arctic lakes, but also might be causing explosions, resulting in mysterious craters appearing around the Arctic in a process called cryovolcanism (see the 2020 National Geographic piece "Colossal crater found in Siberia. What made it?").

The Arctic was thought to be warming two or three times faster than the rest of the planet. Now it's thought that it might be 3.75 times faster (Post et al., 2019). Autumnal warming might be even faster than that, as much as 6-8 times in some parts of the Arctic (per 2020 thread by Van Steenbergen, referencing the University of Maine's Climate Reanalyzer). This will only get faster.

In the interview on Nov. 12 someone asked about whether there will be a sudden, catastrophic release of methane from the warming Arctic, sometimes called a "methane bomb," and my answer was that the threat of climate change to food security in the Arctic is a much more imminent threat than any methane release. Read more about how the hype about a potential methane bomb in the Arctic isn't supported by the findings of scientists studying the subject in this 2020 Popular Science article "The Arctic might be a methane time bomb—or not."

What Are the Particular Impacts of Thawing Permafrost on Indigenous Communities?

In addition to the threats to Arctic indigenous communities posed by colonial settler practices (historic and current), personal and structural racism, and extractive industries (oil, gas, and mining), these communities have to face the threat of climate change, which goes beyond physical threats to pose an existential threat to their cultures. Permafrost thaw is literally uprooting their way of life.

For example, reindeer herders in Siberia have observed disturbances to historic migration routes and pastures due to thawing permafrost: the land they and their ancestors depended on for thousands of years is turning into unpredictable swampland.

There is also the problem of increased isolation for communities that depend on stable permafrost and ice to access food and medicine in the shoulder months of winter, not only exacerbating threats to physical health, but mental health. Check out "Indigenous mental health in a changing climate: a systematic scoping review of the global literature" by Middleton et al. (2020) for an overview of the current research on the latter.

Additionally, there is the more direct problem of falling into caverns in the ground and holes in the ice as these elements of natural infrastructure destabilize. Denise Pollock (then of the Alaska Institute for Justice) presented at the National Adaptation Forum in 2017 about the dangerous conditions now faced by the hunters in her home village of Shishmaref: "We don't have words [in Inupiaq] for how ice is forming now."

In some cases, entire indigenous villages might be lost due to destabilized natural infrastructure leading to displacement. The sudden loss of fresh water due to the collapse of thermokarst lakes has threatened to displace indigenous communities in Chukota, Russia, including the villages of Neshkan, Enurmino, and Uelen, as well as many coastal villages (per Eduard Zdor, a Chukchi marine mammal hunter and academic based out of the University of Alaska, Fairbanks).

Newtok

In Alaska, there is the famous case of the village of Newtok being threatened with erosion as a nearby riverbank recedes due to thawing permafrost, forcing the village to plan to build a new village nine miles away. The new village, Mertarvik, saw its first settlement in 2019. Catastrophic erosion due to permafrost thaw -- "usteq" in Yup'ik ("surface caves in") -- is now addressed in Alaska's State Hazard Mitigation Plan (2018). According to that document, in 2016 usteq "claimed at least 40 feet of ground between Newtok and the Ninglick River [...], with blocks of tundra the size of minivans slumping and being carried away by floodwaters. The town is built on permafrost plateaus just 6-10 feet above river level, and the ground is disintegrating." One-third of Newtok's population has moved to Mertarvik, where residents report finding conditions far healthier (though they had some trouble voting in Alaska's August 18, 2020, primary election, since the state says it didn't realize people were living in the new village). The other two-thirds is awaiting funding to move. 

(Check out the Alaska Institute for Justice presentation on community-led relocation of Alaska Native villages from the National Adaptation Forum in 2019.)

Norilsk

In 2020, Siberia experienced an unprecedented fuel leak caused in part by thawing permafrost, resulting in the contamination of a lake on which the local indigenous peoples (including Nenets and Evenki) depend for food. The leak took place in Norilsk, Russia, the most northern city in the world, and the largest (with over 175,000 permanent residents) built on permafrost inside the Arctic circle. It is home to the largest known nickel, copper, and palladium deposits in the world, and its largest employer is Nornickel, whose subsidiary failed to maintain the fuel reservoir that leaked 21,000 tonnes of diesel fuel into the Ambarnaya River on May 29, 2020, contaminating a 350 square kilometer (135 square mile) area. It eventually reached an important source of food and fresh water for local indigenous communities, Lake Pyasino. The lake was declared "dead" after the spill by the head of the local branch of the Russian Federal Fisheries Agency. The event is unprecedented for several reasons: it is the first (known) significant spill of its size or kind in the Russian Arctic, it was almost immediately associated with climate change-induced permafrost thawing, and it resulted in an unprecedented fine for Nornickel (148 billion rubles, or about 1.9 billion USD), an ethnological impact assessment (which determined there was measurable harm to 700 indigenous individuals), and a 2 billion ruble (about 26 million USD) settlement for the local indigenous peoples. (It should be noted that there are divisions in the indigenous communities regarding the impact of the spill on traditional food sources, described in this excellent blog post by political geographer Dr. Mia Bennett). The government's prosecutor general I. Krasnov ordered safety checks on all "particularly dangerous installations" built on permafrost in the Russian Arctic in the wake of the spill.

What's going on with the walruses?

In the Nov. 12 interview I touched on the loss of sea ice leading to walruses increasingly using land-based haul-outs, leading to the deprivation of coastal indigenous communities of this important food source. Basically, when walruses haul out on land, it leads to crowding and -- in the presence of perceived threats, such as a marine mammal hunter -- stampedes that can easily kill baby walruses. So, it isn't safe to hunt walrus in these haul-outs. There was a hubbub last year when a Netflix documentary ("Our Planet") included 2017 footage of a fatal walrus stampede over a cliff. In that particular case, the footage was spliced from different events to make a more dramatic narrative, and that stampede off that cliff likely had nothing to do with running away from a threat or the reduction in sea ice (read Ed Yong's 2019 piece in the Atlantic on the subject). Fatal stampedes in land-based walrus haul-outs is not a new phenomenon. However, they will become more of a problem as walruses are increasingly forced into hauling out on land. For this reason and others, walruses are particularly vulnerable to extinction because of climate change. (Read more in this 2017 NPR piece "On Thin Ice: Walruses Threatened After U.S. Declines To List As Endangered.")

Good places to look for more information on the implications of thawing permafrost for indigenous communities:

- Alaska Climate Adaptation Science Center (USGS/University of Alaska Southeast).

- Alaska Institute for Justice (helping Alaska Native communities navigate relocation).

- Aborigen-Forum (Russia)

In particular check out its campaign to ask Elon Musk to not buy nickel from Nornickel.

Also, check out Indigenous-Russia.com, which aggregates news relevant to Russia's indigenous peoples.

- International Arctic Research Center (based in Fairbanks, AK).

- The Barents Observer

- The LEO Network - The Local Environmental Observer (LEO) Network is facilitated by the Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium, and its mission is to document any unusual changes seen in the Arctic. (Access the LEO webinar archive.)

- The 2017 Snow, Water, Ice and Permafrost in the Arctic (SWIPA) report (288 p.) by the Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Programme ("conducted between 2010 and 2016 by an international group of over 90 scientists, experts and knowledgeable members of the Arctic indigenous communities"). See the report press release, with associated videos and regional report links.

-  Climate Change in the Bering Strait Region (68 p.), a 2015 report by the Center for Climate and Health at the Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium.  

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Why did Cimpatico ask me to talk about the implications of thawing permafrost for indigenous communities?

Cimpatico contacted me back in September 2020 asking me to come on their adaptation channel, and they didn't specify the topic. I suggested a few topics that I care about and know something about. Among the topics I suggested, they said they had not yet had anybody on talking about thawing permafrost, or its implication for indigenous communities, although they had featured Barrett Ristroph talking about the relocation of Newtok in Alaska on a few occasions. This is a topic that is dear to my heart. In 2004, working at Pacific Environment, I heard from a colleague in Siberia about how permafrost was thawing and causing reindeer herders to lose their traditional pastures, to sink into the muck... to me it is the most heart-breaking of all current climate impacts: cryospheric cultures cannot survive climate change intact.

So I agreed to talk about this topic, and made the rounds checking with friends who work more directly and recently with indigenous communities in Alaska and Siberia to make sure I had the latest news. Particular shout-outs to Galina Angarova at the indigenous rights group Cultural Survival, Jennifer Castner at the Altai Project, and David Gordon, consultant/former Executive Director of Pacific Environment, for their help preparing for this interview. Also thanks to Barrett Ristroph, Chanda Meek, Eduard Zdor, and Anatolii Lebedev for their input, and the rest of the Sosnovka Coalition (an initiative of Pacific Environment).

I am neither a geomorphologist nor actively engaged in helping indigenous communities adapt to thawing permafrost, but I tried to reflect the reality of the situation for indigenous communities as best I could. Hopefully the next time Cimpatico has someone on their adaptation channel talking about this, it will be someone who can share first-hand experience of thawing permafrost from an indigenous perspective.

Check out the Nov. 5, 2020, National Adaptation Forum (NAF) webinar on displacement  that was a great help in preparing to talk about the situation in Alaska: Part 5, "Policy Considerations at Multiple Scales," featuring (among others) Robin Bronen of the Alaska Institute for Justice, and Don Antrobus of the Alaska Tribal Native Health Consortium.

Also: Check out the recordings from the whole 2020 NAF webinar series on displacement.

Check out Barrett's Cimpatico interviews about Newtok:

Climate Relocation: It Takes a Village (and more) to Move a Village (36 min., link to Cimpatico) -  2020, "This Is," S. 1, Ep. 1 (the video isn't dated, but it looks like it was posted to Cimpatico in March 2020).

Avoiding Maladaptations to Flooding and Erosion: A Case Study of Alaskan Native Villages (30 min., link to Youtube) - December 10, 2019, "Research Review," S. 1, Ep. 1.  

Also: Check out her Youtube channel for other presentations about Newtok and other community relocation efforts.

Were you worried about Russian Arctic methane emissions?

Well, if you weren't, now you can worry.

Writing about the newly discovered gargantuan methane plumes on December 12, 2011, Nick Jardine quotes thusly:

One scientist told the Independent: "Earlier we found torch-like structures like this but they were only tens of meters in diameter. This is the first time that we've found continuous, powerful and impressive seeping structures more than 1,000 metres in diameter. It's amazing."

The Russian Far East Sees its First Shark Attacks: Warmer Waters Blamed

Overfishing together with warming offshore waters are cited as possible causes of the first known shark attacks in the Russian Far East according to this Aug. 18, 2011, NYT article "Shark Attacks Shock Russian East." Two or three (with the third unconfirmed) shark attacks took place over the past few days off the shore of the Russian coastal province of Primorsky Krai, where beaches are crowded this time of year.

For US West Coasters, the beaches of Primorsky Krai on the Sea of Japan are relatively more swimmer-friendly than the East Pacific coast, with warmer waters and more sandy shores. The footage they are showing in conjunction with the shark attacks looks like Shamora, a famous beach near Vladivostok where I hung out on at least one occasion back in my Russian environmental activism days, though I don't believe any of the attacks took place there.

For Russian-readers, here's a decent article from Lenta.ru, Aug. 18, 2011, covering the two confirmed attacks of a 25 year old man and a 16 year old boy. Both the NYT and Lenta.ru articles quote WWF's Konstantin Zgurovsky mentioning the role of climate change in the changing migration patterns of the shark.

Lake Baikal May Unlock Climate Impacts

It appears that excellent data collected by one family of scientists living and working on Lake Baikal, Russia, may provide clues to how climate variability affects many diverse species, according to Science Daly ("World's Largest Lake Sheds Light on Ecosystem Responses to Climate Variability" - by Marianne V. Moore, Feb. 18, 2011).

Detailed and frequent measurements of Lake Baikal conditions show correlations between Baikal's temperature and "El Niño indices, reflecting sea surface temperatures over the Pacific Ocean tens of thousands of kilometers away." Measurements also show a strong influence on Baikal conditions by the Pacific Ocean pressure fields described by the Pacific Decadal Oscillation.

"Remarkably, the temperature record that reflects all these climate messages was collected by three generations of a single family of Siberian scientists, from 1946 to the present, and the correlation of temperature with atmospheric dynamics is further confirmation that this data set is of exceptionally high quality," said [Steve] Katz [of NOAA's Channel Islands National Marine Sanctuary]. "This consistent dedication to understanding one of the world's most majestic lakes helps us understand not only the dynamics of Lake Baikal over the past 60 years, but also to recognize future scenarios for Lake Baikal. The statistical approach may be used for similar questions in other ecosystems, although we recognize that the exceptional quality and length of the Baikal data was one of the keys to our success."

Lake Baikal - called the "Pearl of Siberia" - is the world's oldest and deepest lake. It is largest freshwater lake in the world, and home to the Nerpa, one of only three known freshwater seals.

I'd like to point out that those of us working in the increasingly embattled budgetary environment of the public university system in California should look to these scientists working on Baikal for inspiration. They have faced worse barriers than we can imagine working through the funding environment of the Russian Academy of Sciences from 1946 to the present. That family undoubtedly suffered deprivations to maintain their work which many U.S. researchers would not tolerate. My work with those defending the health of Lake Baikal at the small non-profit Pacific Environment has instilled in me a deep respect for the sheer tenacity of Russian scientists. And there's nothing like the passion of a Russian scientist-turned-activist.

Read about Pacific Environment's work protecting Lake Baikal, "the Galapagos of Russia."

Climate Change, Russia's Fires and the Present Uprising in Egypt

When Russia's fires last year led to the curtailing of wheat exports, it was predicted that world food prices would spike and inflame political conflict.

Climate events inflating food prices is just one example of how climate change is going to drive political conflict. Water and energy are also going to see price spikes that drive conflict.

Right now as we watch Egyptians struggle to transition from totalitarianism to democracy, remember that one of the main sparks behind this revolution was not some new societal level of enlightenment, but a new level of desperation driven by food prices.

On Feb. 3, 2011, PRI's Peter Thomson wrote about the Russia fire/ wheat scarcity/ revolution connection.

From "High food prices in Egypt and climate change":

Food price inflation in Egypt was over 20 percent last year. In particular, there’s been a big squeeze from the rising global price of wheat. New York global investment manager Vincent Truglia says depending on how you measure it, the price of wheat went up between 50 and 70 percent in 2010.
[...]

Egypt is among the world’s largest importers of wheat, and the global wheat market received a number of nasty shocks recently. The worst came last summer, when Russia was hit by an unprecedented drought and heat wave that destroyed 40 percent of its wheat harvest.

Russia abruptly banned exports, and Egypt, which had just signed a big wheat deal with Russia, was left scrambling.

The Egyptian government has tried to keep a lid on wheat prices through subsidies and rationing. But Truglia says anxiety over food prices is the key problem facing Egypt today.

And some look further up the chain of events, and trace the problem at least in part to climate change.

“I think we are seeing some of the early effects of climate change on food security,” says veteran environmental analyst Lester Brown, of the Earth Policy Institute. In particular, Brown says the heat wave that led to the collapse of Russia’s wheat harvest was no ordinary weather event.

“If someone had told me that there was likely to be a heat wave in Russia in which the average temperature would be 14 degrees Fahrenheit above the norm — that’s pushing the envelope. I mean FOUR degrees would be a lot.”
[...]


Vicken Checherian, writing for Opendemocracy.net, wrote on Jan. 26, 2011 (The Arab Crisis: Food, Energy, Water, Justice), about other nearby countries taking measures to try to prevent food price-driven revolution: "Even Saudi Arabia is taking precautions; the kingdom aims to double its wheat reserves to 1.4 million tons, enough to satisfy demand for a year." He also points out that food price-driven revolution hasn't historically led to democracy in the region:

The rise of food and energy prices sparked popular demonstrations in Algeria in 1988 and Jordan in 1989. When the authorities could not suppress the demonstrations by pure repression, and could not reduce the prices for lack of means, they chose to open up a closed political system: single-party rule was ended in Algeria in 1989, and in Jordan restrictions on the media and the work of political parties were lifted. In neither case did this political opening lead to sustainable institutions and democratisation: Algeria eventually degenerated into a fratricidal war, Jordan recalled the old habits once the wave of contestation died down.

Let's hope for a better outcome for Egypt.

Russia Burning

Opposition Says Putin Law Cripples Russian Fire-Fighting - Reuters, Aug 3, 2010

Here's the Moscow Times article on the claim by Greenpeace Russia and other groups that the 2007 Forest Code is at fault for the summer wildfires (Aug. 3, 2010, in English, written in Russia by a local journalist)

One way a government can maladapt is to pass laws that impede climate change impact management (like fighting wildfires).

Now this wildfire is costing lives and homes, plus emitting CO2 and destroying forests which act as carbon sinks.

See video of the fires here. The article accompanying is about the destruction of a navy air base. Click on the upper left video still to see more video of the fire.

My thoughts go out to the families in Southwestern Russia.