High Tide: How Climate Crisis is Engulfing Our Planet

Travelling with me were Franny Armstrong, a filmmaker, and photographer Karen Robinson. Franny filmed out of the doorway as the train rattled over deep gorges and through metre-high snowdrifts, whilst Karen snapped shots of snow-bound shacks buried in remote backwoods territory. Everyone gathered at the window as we passed Mount McKinley, but we were disappointed: the great mountain was hidden from view by grey cloud.

Once in Fairbanks we bundled our gear into a taxi and found a cheap backstreet hostel in a part of town where the front gardens were full of junk, and savage-looking dogs barked from behind chain-link fences. The hostel, which had several semi-permanent unemployed residents, was once a brothel, its proprietor confided soon after we arrived. This gave the otherwise unremarkable two-storey wooden building an air of seedy glamour, especially since the taxi driver had known exactly where it was, even calling it by its former name – ‘Ruthie’s’.

The proprietor, a young hunting enthusiast called Dale Curtis, watched us unpack.

‘You guys tourists or something?’ He adjusted his baseball cap uneasily, leaning against the doorframe. (The doors were concertina cardboard, another brothel legacy.)

‘No, we’re journalists. We’re investigating climate change.’

He looked blank.

‘Global warming,’ I continued. ‘Asking people how the weather has changed and that sort of thing.’

He looked intrigued. ‘Well, the weather sure has got strange. It don’t get cold enough fast like it used to, and then it warms up real quick.’

This sounded interesting. I sat up and listened, encouraging him to continue.

‘What really struck me was watching ducks swimming on the river all winter. It was Christmas time, January even, and they were still swimming around. They’re not supposed to be here at that time, they’re supposed to be south already.’

He shook his head in amazement, warming to the theme. ‘And the bears come out too early. They don’t know whether to go into hibernation or to wake up. Folks round here are real worried about it. A couple of years ago at Christmas it rained and melted all the snow away. That just ain’t right, you know?’

As Dale Curtis was suggesting, Fairbanks is supposed to get cold in winter – really cold. Just a hundred and fifty kilometres shy of the Arctic Circle, in mid-December the town receives only three hours of sunlight. As any resident will tell you, the sun doesn’t really come up at all – it just skirts along the horizon, as if entangled in the icy peaks of the Alaska Range, before plunging back down south and leaving Fairbanks in frigid night. Temperatures regularly plummet to –40°C. It’s so cold that the air behaves differently: distant sounds become eerily close, and the smoke from home fires lies horizontally across the rooftops.

Or at least it used to be that cold. In recent winters temperatures in Fairbanks have reached –30°C for only a couple of days, Dale Curtis told me, whilst in previous decades they had remained at –40°C for months at a time. And it’s not just Fairbanks: similar stories come from all over the state. In Barrow, hundreds of kilometres above the Arctic Circle on Alaska’s frozen north coast, there were thunderstorms for the first time in memory a couple of years back. Local people had never seen anything like it: some Native American elders thought that the loud bangs of thunder were bombs going off.

The reason is simple: Alaska is baking. Temperatures in the state – as in much of the Arctic – are rising ten times faster than in the rest of the world. And the effects are so dramatic that entire ecosystems are beginning to unravel, as are the lifestyles of the people – many of them Native Americans – who depend on them. In many ways Alaska is the canary in the coal mine, showing the rest of the world what lies ahead as global warming accelerates.

The man who has done more than perhaps any other to highlight this is a quietly spoken scientist based at the University of Alaska in Fairbanks, Professor Gunter Weller.

I met him on a warm May morning, and the season’s first mosquitoes were descending from the trees as we walked through patches of thawing snow behind Weller’s Center for Global Change and Arctic Systems Research. The Center looked thoroughly modern, with shiny plate-glass windows and a big car park full of big sports utility vehicles. A hundred metres away in the forest, a giant dish was turning gradually around, focusing its data stream on some unseen satellite far above.

‘In Alaska we’re seeing great changes in climate,’ Professor Weller was saying in his soft German accent. ‘There’s no doubt about it. This year we had extreme high temperatures, and in fact it’s been the second warmest year on record.’

When he first arrived in the state, Weller continued, the weather had been quite different – sometimes reaching minus fifty centigrade. ‘In fact, I remember my first New Year’s Eve here in 1968. I was invited next door to a party and I put a shot of very good scotch in an ice-cube tray outside, and it was frozen within half an hour. You wouldn’t see that now, no way.’

Alaskan wintertime temperatures have shot up by an average of six degrees centigrade, Weller told me. ‘This is an absolutely enormous signal,’ he emphasised, ‘bigger than anything the computer models have predicted.’ Summer temperatures were rising too: Fairbanks now regularly sees summertime highs of twenty-five degrees.

One of the best temperature records of all comes not from scientists but from gamblers. Each year the people of Nenana, a small town southwest of Fairbanks, place bets on the exact minute when the ice on the river will begin to break up for the spring thaw. The contest began when Alaska Railroad engineers put down an $800 wager in 1917; by 2000 the jackpot had grown to $335,000, and thousands of people across the state compete. The high financial stakes ensure constant vigilance by the locals, so the record is considered as reliable as the best scientific data – and it shows that the first day of spring has advanced by over a week since the 1920s.

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So was this global warming? I asked Professor Weller. Or perhaps something else?

His answer was unequivocal. ‘I think it’s clearly understood and clearly accepted by the scientific community that this is in part due to the human-induced global greenhouse effect.’ This greenhouse effect, he explained, was amplified at high latitudes by a positive feedback: once snow and ice begin to melt, the reflectivity of the Earth’s surface decreases, allowing more of the sun’s heat to be absorbed. This in turn melts more ice and snow, further reducing the planet’s albedo, allowing still more warming, and so on.

In Fairbanks the rising temperatures were having a dramatic impact. Much of the area is underlain by permafrost – permanently frozen ground – which now, for the first time in thousands of years, is beginning to thaw. As a result, houses are sagging, roads collapsing, and entire buildings being swallowed up by holes in the ground.

Professor Weller gave us a lift to one of the worst-affected neighbourhoods in the city – the aptly named Madcap Lane, where most of the wooden one-storey properties were sagging and distorted in several directions. On the right-hand side one house was tilting sideways, the guttering at one end about a foot further from the roof than at the other. The wonky front steps barely fitted into the porch. I climbed them carefully and knocked on the door.

‘I work nights, and I’ve just gone to bed,’ complained the woman who opened it, glaring at me through sleepy eyes, hair standing up in all directions.

‘It’s our house, it’s not a museum,’ added her teenage daughter irritably from behind the half-closed door. I backed off, and let Franny and Karen take over. Within a few minutes they were deep in conversation with the woman, Vicki Heiker, who soon invited us inside.

Vicki’s daughter Jessica was also smiling now. ‘Here, look at this.’ She placed a pencil at one end of the kitchen table. It quickly rolled off the other end onto the floor.

‘Can you do it again with me filming?’ asked Franny, and Jessica happily obliged. Her mother watched them and laughed. ‘When you spill something it’s like you don’t have much of a chance. You’ve got to clean it up fast otherwise it’ll get away from you.’

‘Do you get used to it?’ I asked.

‘Well, it helps build up your calf muscles since you’re always walking uphill.’ In the sitting room a large dog was jumping around excitedly, shedding dark hairs all over the furniture. Vicki bent down next to a stack of glass shelves in the corner, and pointed to an inch-thick triangle of wood under one of its legs.

‘That’s a shim. It’s elevating that leg to make the whole thing level. Otherwise it would just fall over.’

‘Sometimes my bedroom door won’t shut all the way either,’ Jessica chimed in. ‘Here,’ she went on, changing the subject, ‘do you want to see my pet ferret?’

‘I don’t think anything here is entirely level,’ continued Vicki, ignoring the struggling animal, which broke free from her daughter’s grasp and bolted behind the sofa. ‘You’ve seen the front porch? Well, my son had to come round last week because it fell off.’

I wandered back into the kitchen, where Karen was taking pictures of an impressive-looking crack which snaked out from above the kitchen window. The window was itself askew, and looking through it I could see the house across the street also tilting – in the opposite direction. The whole place was like a badly built Toyland.

‘It’s a trip, isn’t it?’ smiled Vicki, coming up beside me. ‘You look out of here and it makes you feel dizzy.’

But Vicki and Jessica’s house was far from being the worst example. On the way back to our guesthouse the taxi driver took us on a detour up a very narrow track lined with dirty snowbanks. At the end was a log cabin which looked as if it had been pitched into a gigantic hole: it was tilted at an angle that was at least 20 degrees.

‘I stuck it out until two years ago,’ said the elderly woman who had been forced out into a different house nearby. ‘The water and electricity still work, you know. And when my husband first built it back in 1957 the ground was completely flat.’ She shook her head in disbelief.

Roads all around Fairbanks are affected by thawing permafrost: driving over the gentle undulations is like being at sea in a gentle swell. In some places the damage is more dramatic – crash barriers have bent into weird contortions, and wide cracks fracture the dark tarmac. Permafrost damage costs now total $35 million every year, money mostly spent on repairs to affected roads.

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Forests are affected too. Some areas of once-flat land look like bomb-sites, pockmarked with craters – sometimes several feet deep – where permafrost ice underneath them has melted and drained away. These uneven landscapes cause ‘drunken forests’, a phenomenon that has been reported right across Alaska. I saw plenty of evidence of this around Fairbanks: in one spot a long gash had been torn through the tall spruce trees, leaving them toppling over towards each other. Most of them were dying, some already lifeless, their brittle branches snapping off as I pushed through to take a closer look.

Permafrost degradation is one of the clearest signals that something unprecedented is happening in the far north. In Siberian cities hundreds of tall buildings have begun to subside and crack.

(#litres_trial_promo) Whole ecosystems are disappearing too: the Boreal forests which have grown throughout the region since the end of the last Ice Age are now collapsing into marshy bogs as the ground underneath thaws out. In Alaska, spruce and birch forests are being replaced by wetland – in some areas a quarter of the forest has disappeared in the last forty years.

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Whole sections of coastline are breaking off and falling into the sea, as the ice which has kept cliffs solid for centuries begins to melt. In both Canada and Siberia losses of up to forty metres a year have been observed, and in Alaska over half a kilometre has eroded from some stretches of coastline over the past few decades.

(#litres_trial_promo) This may not matter too much when nobody lives there – but many of these coastal areas have been inhabited by indigenous peoples for centuries.

And in Shishmaref, on the west coast of Alaska, the Native Americans who have lived on the same site for decades now live in daily terror of the sea.

SHISHMAREF

It was impossible to tell that Shishmaref was even on the coast. Although the village is actually squeezed onto a long, narrow barrier island, all I could see as our small aircraft looped over the area was a grey airstrip and about a hundred houses in the middle of an immense white plain. A layer of heavy grey cloud hung over the entire area, meeting the horizon in an apparently infinite expanse of nothingness. On the ground it was chilly to say the least: the temperature hovered around minus fifteen Celsius, and a few snow grains blew in the biting northwesterly wind.

Shishmaref is about as far west as you can get on the entire North American landmass. The tip of the Seward Peninsula, on which the village sits, is barely a hundred kilometres from the eastern edge of Russian Siberia. The International Date Line runs through the middle of the freezing Chukchi Sea which separates the two coastlines, meaning that the same morning sun rises a whole day later on the Alaskan side.