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.
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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).
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