It was another cold season full of records in Alaska, mostly of the abnormally warm kind. The state is in the midst of a five-plus year onslaught of extreme warmth, only infrequently broken by the customary cold. This year’s warm season has begun on the same foot.
Signals of the rapid changes in the state are as simple as a whiff of rain in winter in places it usually only snows, or as complex as how stuck weather patterns depleting ice over multiple seasons.
In recent weeks, rivers have lost their ice much earlier than normal, while the extent of ice covering the Bering Sea is alarmingly low. From compromised infrastructure and shifts in plant life, changes resulting from recent climate disruption are tangible.
Two men died in recent weeks when ice gave way under their four-wheelers on the Kuskokwim River in southwest parts of the state. According to Alaska Public Radio, “ice doesn’t get this weak in Bethel until May, but that has changed. This year, it started happening in March.”
That episode was just the beginning of an early melt-off on rivers across the state.
The Tanana River at Nenana — southwest of Fairbanks, in central Alaska — went ice-free on April 14, which was the earliest in its 103-year record by six days. The early disappearance of river ice is indicative of a record to near-record warm winter across the state.
The reasons for the winter warmth were multifaceted. At its root were persistent areas of high pressure over the Yukon and stretching into the Gulf of Alaska. Coupled with low pressure near the Bering Sea and into the Arctic Ocean to its north, mild air was drawn northward. This flow also kept storms coming, which in turn helped sea ice fall to near record minimums.
According to Rick Thoman of the Alaska Center for Climate Assessment and Policy, the most alarming of all the current signs of climate change in Alaska is open water where there should be sea ice.
“Decreased ice extent and thinner, more mobile ice impacts the subsistence economies of western and northern Alaska communities by eliminating or reducing activities that use ice as a platform to work from,” Thoman wrote in an email.
He also points to the fact that sea ice changes make wintertime coastal storms more damaging because ice acts as a buffer against waves. Communities such as Newtok, Chefornak, and about three dozen other small communities on Alaska’s west coast have been planning to relocate in part or in whole.
As another example of sea ice failure impacting local communities, crabbing season in places like Nome on the Bering Sea coast in Alaska’s northwest has already been shortened by about a month on each side. With recent years featuring unprecedented lack of sea ice, crabbing was brought to a total halt in some spots.
While impacts to some of the most prolific fisheries in the world have yet to show themselves strongly, scientists worry that we may now or soon be crossing thresholds that set off a catastrophic chain reaction.
Die-offs of marine and bird life in the region have become increasingly common, as have massive algae blooms in warmer than normal waters.
On land, melting permafrost is releasing gasses like carbon dioxide and methane, part of a feedback loop that also includes more dark soils gathering and storing heat rather than a reflective ice and snowpack that bounces warmth back into the atmosphere.
