Module IX How are climate, terrestial ice and Alaskan indigenous cultures all connected?

(Photo by Charles Mason for the New York Times)
Newtok, Alaska, in spring, as viewed from its water tower. Boardwalks squish into the muck in Newtok, which erosion has turned into an island.
On the last module we were concentrating on polar sea-ice and how the diminishing ice-pack is having an effect on the residents and other inhabitants that depended on it.

We are now covering terrestial ice which I’m a little more familiar with. Quinhagak is
surrounded by tons of little lakes. The “Tunnel Man” has an entertaining way of show how the
thawing of the permafrost can be damaging and costly. The water going in through the cracks of the active layer creates an ice wedge. The ice wedge gets bigger when more water goes in and freezes. When a building is constructed on these ice wedges, the building shifts due to the ice wedge melting.

Quinhagak housing are built on piles. Every year the ground thaws and freezes continually, and due to the repeating cycle, the piles slowly rise incrementally. The thawing and freezing of the ground pushes the piles out of the ground raising the houses higher and higher off the ground. My mom used to joke that were going to reach heaven sooner or later at the rate we had to keep adding new stairs onto the existing stairs.

Some of the buildings like the laundromat are sinking into the ground. The area where the building was going to be erected on was evaluated by engineers a couple of years before it was built. Thermosyphons were put into the ground to keep the ground frozen. The builders didn’t put more thermosyphons in because they were expecting normal (colder) summer temperatures based on old climate data. Unfortunately, it has been anything but normal.

Villages like Newtok are in a worse predicament than Quinhagak right now. Their whole village is slowly being swallowed up by the nearby river. One of the residents said that the land where the community is located is not only sinking, the surrounding land by the river is also eroding. The melting of the cryosphere is being felt by the whole community.

The Ninglick River is melting the permafrost which is similar to someone pulling a rug from under you, but in this case, the permafrost is being pulled away from the tundra resulting in huge chunks of land mass falling into the abyss. One of the arguments of staying or moving was; “It’s less expensive to build a new community then it is to stop the Ninglick River.”

This modules topic hit too close to home to be comfortable. I got shivers when I read about what the residents of Newtok are going through. I've heard about it in the news but never bothered to investigate it any further. It is very similar to what the people in Sishmaref are experiencing.

I haven't been home in a while, but I do know that the river pathway has changed. We've had to move the airport farther inland. When I was in high school, my grandpa used to say that in the future, the little creek that goes through the town will become the main river.
In the video Moving to Higher Ground, Stanley Tom remembered that the elders used to say that the village needs to be relocated, but nobody paid any attention to them because when you are younger, it's harder to visualize the future. The elders had probably experienced having to move before, and knew what was going to happen.