Wetlands across the globe have long served as natural repositories for humanity’s toxic legacy, absorbing and retaining hundreds to thousands of years’ worth of pollution. 

These swampy vaults have quietly been trapping air and water pollution for thousands of years, protecting the world from some of the worst effects of lead, mercury, copper, nickel and other poisonous materials. 

Now, however, a combination of human disruptions and ever increasing wildfires threaten to open these vaults, unleashing their long dormant toxic contents upon the world. 

Peat has a tremendous ability to capture retain toxic metals

The soil in many wetlands is composed of dead and decaying vegetation known as peat. Peat accumulates because perpetually sopping wetland conditions prevent the complete decomposition of dead vegetation. As these deposits accumulate, they form peatlands.

For centuries, peat has been drained, dried and extracted for heating fuel where wood is scarce. Though humans have long burned bricks of peat in their homes, climate change and wetland draining are drying entire wetlands, transforming them into perfect fuel for huge smoky wildfires.

Centuries of fallout from industrial processes such as smelting has deposited toxic metals in wetlands hundreds or even thousands of kilometres away from their point of origin. Human and industrial wastewater has, in places, added to this burden. 

Wetlands have absorbed and stored these contaminants, holding them back from vulnerable aquatic ecosystems and saving humans from ingesting them. 

Peat has a tremendous ability to capture and retain toxic metals by binding the metals to the peat itself through a process called adsorption. Once bound, the toxic metals are immobilized and pose little threat to the surrounding environment unless the peatland is disturbed, like from a wildfire.

Climate change and human activity degrade wetlands, with frightening results

Human activities such as road building and resource extraction have seriously disrupted wetland ecosystems, leaving drained wetlands vulnerable to fire, as Canadians saw in the catastrophic Fort McMurray, Alta., wildfire of 2016.

As climate change and human actions further degrade wetlands, the resulting wildfires threaten to return humanity’s toxic legacy. This cycle carries frightening implications for the health of people and the environment.

In 2015, Indonesia recorded about 35,000 excess deaths after a major peatland fire. Meanwhile, Canada and the United States are far from immune from exposure to peat fire smoke. In early June 2023, cities as far away as Washington, D.C., and New York were blanketed in thick smoke from peat fires in northern Canada, which is home to many of the world’s peatlands.

At the same time, climate change is accelerating the drying of peatlands everywhere, turning their huge stores of carbon into a carbon burden. Furthermore, as concentrated pollutants build up in wetlands, the accumulation of toxic metals is killing plants that act as their natural lid, allowing moisture to escape and speeding the conversion of more wetlands to tinderboxes. 

Once ignited, peatland fires are difficult to contain as they can smoulder for weeks, months or even years. They produce copious amounts of smoke and ash, filling the air with microscopic particles.

Even without metal pollution, these airborne particles can cause severe illness and death. Making a bad situation worse, toxic metals once safely stored in wetlands bind to these airborne particles and spread everywhere.

Nature-based solutions can offer hope for degraded wetlands

As with many global environmental issues, it is easy to feel helpless to control such a huge and complex problem. Fortunately, nature-based solutions can have a substantial positive impact on keeping this toxic legacy from being released. 

We can restore drying or dried-out wetlands back to their original state as functional ecosystems through, at the most basic level, preventing them from draining down canals and other human infrastructure. Indeed, even without further intervention, re-wetting wetlands can reduce their risk of wildfire ignition. However, restoration must be managed carefully, to avoid flushing toxic metals from wetlands into neighbouring streams, rivers and lakes.

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Covering nearly the same area as Norway, the Hudson Bay Lowlands in northern Ontario and Manitoba is home to the southernmost continuous expanse of permafrost in North America. Compared with many marine waterways this far south, Hudson Bay stays frozen late into the summer, its ice-covered surface reflecting sunlight and keeping the surrounding area cold.

The influence of Hudson Bay on the weather is crazy, says Adam Kirkwood, a graduate student at Carleton University in Ottawa. “It can be sunny and 20 C one day in August, and then half an hour later there’s a wicked wind coming in from the bay — it’s 5 C, and you’re putting on all your layers, and you’re still freezing cold. And when it’s neither of those two things,” he says, “it’s very, very buggy.”

Trapped in all that permafrost is 30 billion tonnes of carbon. It’s an unfathomable amount, says Kirkwood. With global warming, the permafrost is thawing, threatening to release a “carbon bomb” of heat-trapping methane gas to the atmosphere. But there’s something else lurking in the permafrost, too. Something that has the potential to be more immediately dangerous to the people and wildlife living in the area: mercury.

Wildfires and volcanoes belch mercury and since the Industrial Revolution so, too, do coal-burning power plants and factories. Warm air currents carry mercury in its inorganic heavy metal form to the Arctic where it settles into the soil and vegetation before being safely locked away in the deeply frozen permafrost.

In its inorganic form, mercury is less threatening to people. But as the permafrost thaws, says Kirkwood, mercury is finding its way into the soil and into the regions’ many ponds, rivers and lakes. Once there, microbes can convert inorganic mercury into the form to be concerned about: neurotoxic methylmercury.

For the Indigenous peoples of northern Ontario who have lived off the peatlands for thousands of years — hunting caribou, catching fish, and gathering native plants — the lurking threat poses a risk to their way of life.

So for the past six years, Kirkwood has been coming to this remote environment every summer, helicoptering in to drill thick cores of peat and bringing them back to his lab for analysis. On these trips, Kirkwood often has help from Sam Hunter, a self-taught independent scientist from Peawanuck, Ont., who is a member of Weenusk First Nation.

Back in the 1970s, Hunter saw how scientists studying the Hudson Bay Lowlands used Indigenous peoples as guides, but didn’t involve them in their research. Now, he says, there’s a co-management process — he accompanies researchers on their fieldwork and helps bring their findings back to local communities. Bringing together outside scientists and traditional knowledge is important, he says, because Indigenous peoples have seen firsthand how the permafrost is changing.

“Walking on permafrost is like walking on really hard ground, like gravel,” says Hunter. When there’s permafrost, he says, “there’s all kinds of flora. There’s berries, vegetation that animals feed on. We collect wild tea.”

But once the permafrost thaws, he says, “the environment turns into a swampland … You can’t even walk, you’d sink.” Along with the disappearing permafrost “go the animals. They move higher and higher into the Arctic. Muskox has disappeared and a few shorebirds we used to have — they’re moving north.”

Methylmercury seeping out of the permafrost is the latest water-quality issue First Nations communities in the region have faced. Closer to the Manitoba border, industrial mercury pollution from the 1960s still affects 90 percent of the Anishinaabe community Grassy Narrows. Many First Nations communities across Canada still lack clean drinking water. In the absence of government support for water-quality testing, Hunter has trained three community members in Peawanuck to test their water and fish.

Whether all of the mercury idling in the permafrost will become a significant threat to locals hinges on the answers to a few outstanding questions — questions Kirkwood aims to answer.

A decade ago, scientists discovered that certain microbes with a specific gene can convert inorganic mercury into toxic methylmercury. Scientists know some microbes have this ability and others don’t, but efforts to relate the abundance of microbes with mercury methylating potential to the amount of methylmercury in the environment have been unsuccessful. That’s led scientists studying mercury cycling, like Andrea Bravo at the Institute of Marine Sciences in Spain, to theorize that there’s more at play dictating the pace of methylmercury production, like the complex relationships between the entire community of microbes in the soil.

That’s where Kirkwood’s research comes in. By drilling and taking core samples of the permafrost, then measuring the amount of inorganic mercury while at the same time sequencing the DNA of everything in the soil, he hopes to better understand how methylmercury gets produced in thawing permafrost. Once he knows that, he can figure out where the threat is largest by looking at where mercury methylating microbes and inorganic mercury overlap.

“It’s a hot topic, a timely research question,” says Bravo, who isn’t involved in Kirkwood’s research. “We are suddenly having a surface of soil that was not reactive before, and it’s becoming reactive. … We don’t know how much mercury is coming from this permafrost.”

Bravo points out there are still many unknowns in efforts to gauge the mercury threat. For one, it’s still not yet possible to accurately predict methylmercury levels in freshwater waterways or the ocean based on land sources. Despite global research efforts, “we still don’t understand the process completely,” she says. “We’ve put in a lot of effort, but we aren’t there yet.”

So far, Kirkwood’s initial findings show reason for hope. Previous Arctic-scale estimates of inorganic mercury abundance have vastly overestimated how much mercury is being stored in the Hudson Bay Lowlands. Kirkwood’s cores show mercury levels 10 times lower. But that doesn’t mean all is well. In thermokarst fens, meltwater ponds created when iceberg-like permafrost chunks thaw, methylmercury levels are higher than in the surroundings.

As more permafrost thaws and these ponds connect, methylmercury production will likely increase. And if this mercury reaches the bay, biomagnification could cause it to build up to high concentrations, making its way up the food chain from algae to the tissue of fish that people catch and eat.

One of the things Hunter says he’s been told by the scientists who come up from the south is that the polar bear is the barometer for climate change. “And I don’t agree with that. I think the barometer for climate change is the palsa, the melting permafrost,” he says. “And I think that we need to understand what’s coming out of the ground now.”

This article first appeared in Hakai Magazine and is republished here with permission. Read more stories like this at hakaimagazine.com.

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Two years ago, the world lost a Manhattan-sized piece of the Milne Ice Shelf, one of the last, thickest — and at the time, most intact — ice shelves of its kind in the Canadian Arctic. In July, for the first time since that calving event, a small team of researchers touched down on one of the northernmost points on the planet to study what led to that collapse. They were also seeking answers about what it means for the entire ecosystem.

Although an ever-growing array of space-based technology allows scientists to observe and collect data on the Arctic remotely — including the satellite cameras that first alerted scientists with the Canadian Ice Service that 79 square kilometres of once land-fast ice was adrift in the Arctic Ocean — there’s no substitute for actually being there. 

That’s why scientists like Derek Mueller, a glaciologist with the Water and Ice Research Laboratory at Carleton University in Ottawa, have made an annual trip to the Milne Fiord for the past 14 years.

Getting to this remote location north of Resolute, Nvt., is no small feat. As the crow flies, Milne Fiord is roughly as far from Toronto as Halifax is from Victoria. Natural Resources Canada’s Polar Continental Shelf Program supports this Far North research by providing field equipment, accommodations in Resolute and transportation to the fiord. But like so many things these last two years, the pandemic made these trips impossible. 

The anticipation was almost palpable on a cloudy July day when Mueller and a team of international scientists finally boarded a De Havilland Twin Otter aircraft loaded with camping gear, scientific tools and minds full of post-calving event questions. 

They hoped the instruments they placed under the ice three years ago would provide answers — assuming they were intact and could be found. Other investigations would require a medley of hands-on work orchestrated around the availability of a helicopter, needed to effectively navigate the icy expanse of the fiord, which extends more than 80 kilometres from the tip of the shelf to the top of the glacier. 

But when conducting fieldwork at the top of the world, even the best-laid plans can change at a moment’s notice.

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This story was made possible by funding through the Local Journalism Initiative.

River banks have slumped, forests have been lost and buildings have shifted and cracked on soft ground. Lakes and ponds have drained in some places and formed in others where once-solid land has collapsed. 

Permafrost, which underlies 40 per cent of Canada’s landmass, is continuously frozen earth beneath the surface layers that freeze and thaw with the seasons. 

But with northern Canada warming about three times as fast as the rest of the world, climate change threatens the permanence of vast stretches of this frozen ground — and the ecosystems and communities it supports. 

For the people living in the subarctic Dehcho region of the Northwest Territories, the changes have been stark.

“Our Elders definitely noticed a real change in how things look,” Dehcho First Nations Grand Chief Gladys Norwegian told The Narwhal in an interview. “They don’t have to be scientists to know, they just feel it and see it.” 

While the impacts are felt most acutely in the North, permafrost thaw has implications for the global climate as well. 

Scientists are now investigating how increased warming of the North could be part of a vicious cycle known as the permafrost carbon feedback loop — the more the climate warms, the more permafrost thaws and potentially emits more greenhouse gasses, which further warms the climate and thaws more permafrost.

Permafrost holds twice as much carbon as the atmosphere, and roughly 15 per cent of that stored carbon is vulnerable to being released, Merritt Turetsky, director of the Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research at the University of Colorado Boulder, told The Narwhal in an interview. 

While Turetsky said emissions from permafrost are small relative to human-caused carbon pollution, they are an added burden on a climate already in crisis.

“It is a threat to climate; it will create additional warming on top of anthropogenic emissions,” she said. 

The risks to infrastructure in Dehcho communities loom in the future — potentially amplified by the permafrost carbon feedback loop — but permafrost thaw has already taken a toll in the region, Norwegian said.

“Our winters are getting shorter and warmer, snow is melting earlier in the year, and the permafrost is thawing,” she said. “These changes are seen in the flow of the streams, the thickness of the ice on the lake.” 

“Many of our forests are dying off and being replaced by wetlands,” she said. 

For traditional land users, who harvest food by hunting and fishing, these are worrying shifts that have made travel more dangerous, Norwegian added.

“It’s very unpredictable and it puts a lot of strain on all of us that still really depend on the land.”

And now, with even more emissions potentially being released as part of the permafrost carbon feedback loop, permafrost melt threatens to accelerate further. And with it, the effects on the already altered region could accelerate as well.

The Edéhzhíe Indigenous Protected Area encompasses 14,200 square kilometres located in the Dehcho region of the Northwest Territories. Dehcho elders say they have already observed dramatic changes to the landscape in the region, including forests dying off and being replaced by wetlands. Photo: Environment and Climate Change Canada

Permafrost carbon feedback loop the result of thawing peat

Whether greenhouse gases are emitted as a result of permafrost thaw depends on what’s frozen underground. 

If the permafrost consists of sand, which contains very little carbon, then it may destabilize the ground when it thaws, but it won’t result in high emissions, Turetsky explained. 

It’s a different story when the permafrost consists of peat and contains stores of carbon — the remnants of ancient plants and animals

As permafrost thaws, microbial communities wake up from a frozen slumber and begin to metabolize the carbon that’s stored in the soil, Lisa Stein, a professor of environmental microbiology at the University of Alberta, explained in an interview. 

A map created by WWF-Canada for its 2019 wildlife protection assessment indicates the levels of soil carbon across Canada. As permafrost melts in the North, microbial communities wake up from a frozen slumber and begin to metabolize the carbon that’s stored in the soil, releasing it into the atmosphere. This is what’s known as the permafrost carbon feedback loop. Map: WWF-Canada

A diverse array of microbes breathe in oxygen and breathe out carbon dioxide, as humans do, Stein said. 

Specialized microorganisms called methanogens, meanwhile, generate methane, a greenhouse gas more powerful than carbon dioxide, as a by-product of metabolism.

The rich organic and waterlogged soils left behind as permafrost thaws in certain areas “are the perfect conditions for methanogens,” Stein explained.  

“They survive and grow and divide because they’re making methane,” she said. “That’s actually how they make a living.” 

In response, some scientists are now investigating the potential to use another set of specialized microbes that consume methane, called methanotrophs, to help counteract the methane-generating methanogens awoken by permafrost thaw.

Peat moss, for instance, has a microbiome that’s rich in microbes that consume methane, Stein said.

“The idea would be that if you can encourage the growth of peat moss, then you’re also encouraging the activity of methane-consuming microbes,” she explained. “It’s a carbon sponge, essentially.”

Action group aims to tackle emissions from permafrost thaw

Growing more peat moss was just one of the potential responses to the permafrost carbon feedback loop discussed during a March dialogue series hosted by the Permafrost Carbon Feedback Action Group. 

Mike Brown, a Vancouver venture capitalist focused on climate change, established the group in partnership with the Permafrost Association of Canada to help address the challenge of greenhouse gas emissions from thawing permafrost. 

The group plans to draft an “intervention roadmap” to guide policy responses to permafrost thaw in support of global efforts to slash carbon pollution.

“Emissions from permafrost can constitute a major global climate problem, one that’s potentially serious enough to make it much more difficult for us humans to achieve our net-zero carbon goals,” Brown said during his introductory comments to the dialogue series. 

Over the course of the next century, permafrost thaw could emit as many greenhouse gases as deforestation and other land use change, Ted Schuur, a professor of ecosystem ecology at Northern Arizona University, said during the first webinar.

“When we think about climate change mitigation, which is keeping carbon out of the atmosphere, Arctic carbon emissions just makes that mitigation problem that much harder,” Schuur said.

A researcher measures thawing permafrost on Herschel Island, a few kilometres off the Yukon coast. Dramatic changes to landscapes in the North could be accelerated by the permafrost carbon feedback loop. Photo: Boris Radosavljevic / Wikimedia Commons

Eliminating fossil fuel emissions needed to save permafrost

The basic premise of solutions to the permafrost carbon feedback loop is simple: reduce permafrost thaw to reduce the emissions it releases. How to prevent permafrost thaw is where things get complicated.

In subsequent webinars, experts discussed ideas to help keep the Arctic cool and prevent further permafrost thaw, including land-use changes and the more controversial stratospheric aerosol injection.

One example of a land-use change came from northern Siberia, where Russian scientists have introduced Yakutian horses, reindeer, musk ox and other herbivores to Pleistocene Park to re-establish the grasslands of the mammoth steppe biome that was widespread during that last ice age. 

The grasslands, which reflect more sunlight than the shrubs and forests they replaced, help keep permafrost cooler, John Moore, chief scientist at the College of Global Change and Earth System Science at Beijing Normal University, explained during the second webinar in the series.  

While this type of landscape change could be included as part of a portfolio of options to help preserve permafrost in certain areas, Moore said it may not be a feasible solution on a broad scale.

Stratospheric aerosol injection, meanwhile, may offer broader cooling of Arctic and subarctic areas — but carries substantial risks. 

Stratospheric aerosol injection is a type of solar geoengineering that involves spraying sulphate particles into the atmosphere to reflect sunlight, mimicking the effect of particles released during volcanic eruptions. 

While experts say stratospheric aerosol injection could conceivably cool surface temperatures in the Arctic, it risks acid rain, which is detrimental to ecosystems, and depletion of the ozone layer, which offers protection from dangerous UV radiation exposure. 

“Every now and then we get a really large volcanic eruption that dumps aerosols into the stratosphere, so high up in the atmosphere. Those [aerosols] persist for a while and cool the planet,” Douglas MacMartin, a senior research associate at the Sibley School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at Cornell University, explained during the second webinar. “In principle, you could do the same thing by flying airplanes into the stratosphere.” 

“Whether or not we should do it is, again, a more complicated question,” he added.

In an interview, Turetsky said she’s skeptical of geoengineering as a way to prevent permafrost thaw and questions whether these ideas would address or perpetuate the climate and environmental injustices that northern communities are grappling with already. 

While Turetsky said she’s not opposed to more “brainstorming” on potential geoengineering solutions, the main focus should be on decarbonizing the economy. 

“We cannot lose sight that anthropogenic emissions are the driver, by far, of climate change,” she said.

The Mackenzie River system is Canada’s largest watershed, and the tenth largest water basin in the world. Parts of the watershed sit atop permafrost, making it vulnerable to climate change. Approximately 40 per cent of Canada’s landmass overlays permafrost. Photo: Joshua Stevens / NASA Earth Observatory

Pushing for action on the national and international stages

Brown, the chair and founder of the Permafrost Carbon Feedback Action Group, said the team will compile a final report on the dialogue series. But the group’s work won’t stop there.

They plan to meet with officials in the federal government, engage with partners in other Arctic countries and push to ensure the challenge of permafrost carbon is on the agenda at international climate meetings in the fall.

“The permafrost carbon feedback is a legitimate issue of concern and is an active area of scientific inquiry,” Cecelia Parsons, a spokesperson for Environment and Climate Change Canada, said in an emailed statement in response to questions from The Narwhal. 

The department “continues to work on advancing the incorporation of permafrost carbon feedback in our earth-system modelling to further our understanding of its influence on climate change,” she added.

One message that came through clearly during the discussions is the need for Indigenous and northern communities to be actively involved in the work to address both climate change broadly, and permafrost thaw in particular.

During the final dialogue, Natan Obed, president of the national Inuit organization Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami, said he’s “talked about not wanting to be the canary singing in the coal mine alone.”

He wants to do more than ring the alarm bells.

“I also want to be part of the way in which we solve this challenge,” he said. 

“We need to work together,” he said.

Charlotte Irish, Tuktoyaktuk’s monitoring program coordinator, assists Paul Mann from Northumbria University with gas sampling in a permafrost slump on Hooper Island. The samples can provide insight into concentrations of greenhouse gases released by thawing permafrost. Photo: Weronika Murray / The Narwhal

$1 billion in infrastructure at risk in the Northwest Territories

For the North, the challenge of permafrost thaw is about more than emissions: it also raises substantial concerns for infrastructure built on increasingly unstable land. 

“Permafrost thaw is at the heart of the challenges that we are going to face in our communities and also in our homelands outside of our communities for the next generation — not only because of the risk of further elevated emissions,” Obed said. 

Vital community infrastructure is under threat from permafrost thaw in Inuit Nungangat, the Inuit homeland in Canada. Adapting to these challenges is a key priority in the National Inuit Climate Change Strategy, which calls for investments in widespread hazard mapping, vulnerability assessments and infrastructure that can withstand the changing climate.

The Northwest Territories is facing similar challenges, with more than $1 billion worth of infrastructure at risk from permafrost thaw, according to Canada’s latest climate plan.

In the Dehcho region, First Nations have partnered with researchers, combining Dehcho knowledge with western science, to better understand and adapt to the impacts of climate change in the region. 

Dehcho First Nations are working to develop a climate change strategy of their own and through the Dehcho Collaborative on Permafrost, a partnership with the Scotty Creek Research Station run by Wilfrid Laurier University, they are working with scientists to develop a regional permafrost map and monitor permafrost changes. 

This work is critical: even if the world were able to wrestle the greenhouse gas emissions generated by people to zero tomorrow, more permafrost would thaw because of emissions that have already been emitted. 

“Understanding what that change is going to look like is what occupies most of my effort,” Steve Kokelj, head of permafrost science at the Northwest Territories Geological Survey, told The Narwhal. 

It’s a complex task. 

“Permafrost thaw means very, very different things for different environments and consequently, it also means very different things for the people that live in the North, depending on where you are,” Kokelj said, noting some areas may experience landslides while others see conversion of forests to wetlands.

Either way, it’s an impact. “Understanding that variability is super important for society to be able to adapt,” he said.

‘We need to treat Mother Earth differently’

Ultimately, if the goal is to save as much permafrost from extinction as possible, the best chance may lie in the drastic reduction of human-caused greenhouse gas emissions.

“Decarbonization might save some permafrost,” Turetsky said. And saving permafrost could reduce the impacts of the permafrost carbon feedback loop. 

One thing is certain, continued growth of global emissions will result in the loss of biodiversity and ecosystems, with arctic and subarctic regions at particularly high risk for irreversible changes.

“Our Elders kept telling us that there’s something that’s going to come to warn us,” Norwegian said. “COVID is just a warning for us that there is more to come — and I think we all know that — if we don’t do anything for climate change.”

“We need to need to do things differently; we need to treat Mother Earth differently,” she said.

Editor’s Note: Norwegian and Violet Jumbo, Dehcho First Nations language manager, also provided a statement in Dene Zhatie to The Narwhal, alongside an English translation.

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Longer, rainier summers are thawing permafrost at an accelerated rate in interior Alaska, according to a new study, begging the question: what does this mean for rainy summers in the Canadian North?

“Thawing is happening even faster than we thought,” said Thomas Douglas, an environmental engineer with the U.S. Army Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory and lead author of the study. “We’ve had these crazy wet summers. It’s gonna be bad for permafrost.”

The study, published in Nature’s Climate and Atmospheric Science journal, found that between 0.6 and 0.8 centimetres of permafrost thawed for every centimetre of above-average rainfall in Alaska between 2013 and 2017.

Many Yukoners likely noticed, and commented on, the many rainy summer days this year compared to last, but Fabrice Calmels, research chair of permafrost and geoscience at Yukon University Research Centre, said that’s a matter of public perception and doesn’t necessarily mean the territory’s permafrost cover was impacted. 

“We’ll have to check the precipitation record at the end [of the summer] to know the quantity of water that came to the ground,” he said. “There’s a difference between several large events and small events spread out through the summer.”

Considering all of the factors at play in permafrost thaw, including winter and summer temperatures, and snow cover, as well as the territory’s broad zone of frozen ground, Calmels said it will take some time to see how Yukon fared this summer.

“If we have a very cold winter with little snow, maybe the impact of this summer raining will be mitigated, even cancelled,” he said. “To get this perspective it takes seasons, or years.”

At the moment, he said the impact of groundwater on permafrost is more of a concern in the sites his team monitors, though the relationship between precipitation and temperature, as well as snow accumulation and other factors, are taken into account in their surveys.

Coastal erosion on Yukon’s only Arctic island exposes looming climate threat

According to a 2015 report by Yukon University, annual precipitation in the territory has increased by six per cent over the past 50 years, with summers seeing the most rainfall compared to other seasons. 

“Rain water, especially in the summer, is pretty warm and it can move warm, thermal mass down through the soil a lot faster than just warm air temperatures can,” Douglas said. “If you lose three to four weeks of winter to summer, what used to be falling as snow is now falling as rain.”

Study finds effects of precipitation on permafrost vary depending on vegetation 

Ground cover plays a role in insulating the permafrost that underlies 24 per cent of the northern hemisphere from thaw brought on by heavy summer rainfall, according to the Alaska study. 

Wetter and warmer conditions that are expected across much of the Arctic as a result of climate change will affect the vegetation. And as that vegetation changes, so too does its ability to protect the frozen ground. 

Researchers looked at four permafrost sites near Fairbanks, Alaska, with differing types of vegetation cover such as grassy tundra, wetlands and mixed forests. They took measurements in the same locations every year throughout the study to monitor changes in the permafrost.

Over the five years of the study, the depth of the active layer — the layer of soil above permafrost that freezes in the winter and thaws in the summer — increased to varying degrees across the sites, meaning the permafrost had started to thaw. 

The summers of 2014 and 2016 were the first and third wettest seasons on record since meteorological data first started to be tracked in the area 91 years ago. The study shows this led to an increase in active layer depth. 

After the extremely wet summer of 2014, permafrost didn’t recover to 2013 levels, even after drier seasons that followed, the study shows. Several areas now have “taliks,” or pockets of earth surrounded by permafrost that no longer freeze up.

NASA scientists flew over Alaska and the Canadian North in 2017, measuring the elevation of rivers and lakes to study how thawing permafrost is affecting water on the landscape. Photo: Peter Griffith / NASA / Flickr

The study illustrated that some environments are better equipped to protect permafrost from precipitation. Forests, particularly those with peat moss, are the best, Douglas said, adding that thick canopies and moss-covered grounds do a good job of intercepting rainfall. 

“That moss is an amazing sponge and it literally sucks up the water,” he said, adding that there’s no standing water in these areas. There was about 0.3 centimetres of permafrost thaw for every centimetre of increased rainfall in sites with black spruce and peat moss; in mixed forests, there were 0.6 centimetres of thaw, Douglas said.  

However, he added, the earth beneath the forests tends to contain more dry sand than moisture-bearing silt and has low ice content to begin with. Soil temperatures, on average, are warmer under mixed forests than other vegetation and are increasing in temperature, Douglas said. The winter freeze, he said, is no longer enough to refreeze the grounds that thawed the previous summer.

But disturbed areas — lands affected by human development like trail crossings or lacking a tree canopy due to, say, forest fires — fared the worst among the test sites. In these areas, about one centimetre of permafrost thawed per centimetre of increased rainfall. 

These are relatively low-lying areas with little to no tree or underbrush coverage. “Water can linger in those areas and work its magic on thawing,” Douglas said.  

Wetlands are also on the more-vulnerable list, Douglas said, because rainfall causes more standing water and has higher potential to penetrate permafrost. These areas saw 0.9 centimetres of thaw for every centimetre of additional rainfall.

Douglas plans to return to the sites this fall to investigate how another summer of heavy rainfall affected permafrost depths.

“I expect we’ll continue to see this top-down thaw,” he said. “I’m assuming we’re going to continue to see that this year, maybe even at a greater pace because it was so wet.”

But it’s not only the North that is impacted by thawing permafrost. Arctic permafrost stores an estimated 1.4 million megatonnes of carbon in frozen organic matter. As it thaws, microorganisms that were dormant when frozen start to break down that matter, releasing carbon and methane into the atmosphere.

“It has global ramifications,” Douglas said.

Holistic approach needed to understand permafrost thaw

While there’s no doubt that large volumes of water affect permafrost thaw, there are other variables at play that also need to be considered — some of which are missing from the study, said Philip Marsh, a hydrologist at Wilfrid Laurier University who has studied permafrost in the Canadian Arctic for more than four decades. 

He had further questions around the amount of rain that fell, how much water from the ground ended up in the atmosphere and how long the snow remained on the ground.

“The depth of thaw and the thaw of the permafrost is really controlled by a whole range of factors,” he continued. “Different types of vegetation trap different amounts of snow, for example, and snow is good at insulating the ground during the winter.”

The vanishing point: life on the edge of the melting world

Understanding the rate of permafrost thaw requires a holistic approach, he said, including the impacts of air temperature, humidity and solar heat, as well as water seeping into permafrost.

While you can’t paint all of the North with the same brush, Marsh said there is value in applying the findings of the study to areas that are receiving less snow and rainfall than they historically did, such as Inuvik, N.W.T., to understand future outcomes.

He said we could see all Arctic precipitation levels change in the coming years as sea ice continues to disappear, leaving more open water and more evaporation that eventually becomes precipitation.

“As the Arctic Ocean becomes more ice-free in the summer, you would expect many of these areas to become eventually wetter,” Marsh said.

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.

Researchers are looking toward Herschel Island, the northernmost point of Yukon, to understand how coastal erosion is contributing to the release of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

Erosion across Arctic coastlines has become something of a truism. But it could be the sleeping giant of carbon dioxide release, which, in turn, leads to a warmer planet.

Herschel, a 116-square-kilometre island made up of mostly permafrost, is receding by roughly one metre per year, said Hugues Lantuit, a researcher with the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Ocean Research. On one stretch of the island, which is located off the Yukon coast in the Beaufort Sea, researchers believe erosion is happening at up to 15 metres per year.

“We see that for the entire coast of the Yukon,” Lantuit said. “The Yukon is losing territory.”

This makes it an ideal place to research the relationship between permafrost erosion and carbon dioxide production. 

Permafrost holds huge stores of carbon —  it’s made up of layers of compounded plant and animal matter that’s been encased in the ice-sediment mix for thousands of years. In a frozen state, this carbon-rich matter doesn’t decay to create carbon dioxide. But as permafrost meets warmer temperatures and crashing waves, a thaw follows, allowing carbon dioxide to be produced. 

Along the coast and in nearshore waters, this production is happening at a faster rate than on land, researchers have found. 

By 2100, carbon dioxide that’s likely to be produced from thawing permafrost across the circumpolar Arctic could contribute 0.3 degrees to global warming, Lantuit told The Narwhal. This estimate doesn’t even include the possible release of carbon dioxide from coastal erosion.  

The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report doesn’t account for carbon dioxide released by permafrost in general, Lantuit added. That report, released in 2018, says that warming must not exceed 1.5 degrees in order to stem more extreme weather, rising sea levels and poverty. But there haven’t been adequate monitoring tools to gauge how permafrost erosion is contributing to this problem.

What eroding coastal permafrost could unlock

To understand the levels of carbon dioxide released from the eroding coastlines, Lantuit’s team mixed samples of permafrost from Herschel Island with seawater, and left them to degrade for four months. The goal was to simulate the natural environment and process of erosion in the area. 

From this, researchers found there was a 50 per cent increase of carbon dioxide production in samples left at 4 C and a 15 per cent increase in samples at 16 C, compared to permafrost samples not mixed with seawater, simulating inshore conditions, explained George Tanski, a colleague of Lantuit’s and lead author of the study, in an email to The Narwhal.

Carbon dioxide produced by thawing coastal permafrost isn’t necessarily being emitted into the atmosphere, though. It could be absorbed by the water, and the study didn’t account for certain parameters that could disrupt the flow of carbon dioxide, such as the presence of algae blooms. 

Ultimately, there is twice the amount of carbon in permafrost than currently in the atmosphere, Lantuit said. 

“That’s why permafrost is making the headlines, because there’s a lot of carbon in there,” he said. “No scientist is going to tell you that all carbon is going to be released and turned into greenhouse gas emissions immediately. Some of it is refractory, but still, it’s there and it can be released.”

Losing Herschel Island 

Herschel Island, or Qikiqtaruk, was turned into a territorial park in 1987, as a result of the Inuvialuit Final Agreement.

The island continues to be used for subsistence harvesting, though not to the degree it once was, as the area is getting harder to access, said Richard Gordon, senior park ranger at Qikiqtaruk Territorial Park. 

Heritage buildings on the east end of Herschel Island. Photo: George Tanski

“There’s more rough water and the erosion that is happening is filling in the little bays that people used to use as safe havens. People are concerned about getting caught in storms and stuff like that. It really affects the travel and harvesting along the shoreline.”

Gordon is Inuvialuit, from Aklavik, Northwest Territories, just over the Yukon border.

“Erosion, climate change, is affecting the cultural subsistence harvesting of the Inuvialuit throughout the settlement region,” he said. 

Herschel island was also a hub for European and American whalers in the late 19th century, who constructed 11 buildings at the island’s east end that now have heritage status. Three of these buildings had to be moved upward of 20 metres from the shore since 2005.

“A lot of the buildings at Pauline Cove were threatened by high water and storm surges,” Gordon said, adding that historical artifacts were getting washed away due to erosion.

Just how fast are Arctic coastlines eroding?

Between 2000 and 2013 researchers have seen a “drastic increase” in erosion on Herschel Island, compared to the decades before, said Lantuit, who has been visiting the island every summer since 2003.

The average rate of coastal erosion in the Arctic is 0.5 metres per year, Lantuit said. And notably, 34 per cent of the earth’s coastlines are found in the Arctic. 

“If it goes to one metre per year, which is now in the realm of real possibility for the Arctic, it sounds like little, but it’s going to be 100 per cent more carbon released into the ocean, mathematically,” Lantuit said. “The magnitude of change is enormous.”

The drivers behind erosion are many. There’s more open water now in the Arctic (as late as November), which allows more waves to lick the coastline, gradually diminishing it. The Arctic ocean is getting warmer, too, and storm surges that cause water levels to rise are becoming more frequent, Lantuit said.

“That’s what we’re moving towards.”

Just what this could ultimately mean for climate change, the report says, needs to be accounted for in climate models going forward. And Herschel Island, at least what’s left of it, could be a key to understanding this.

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Just over 100 years ago, droves of people hunting for gold arrived in Yukon from all around the world in what became known as the Klondike Gold Rush. Dawson City became their mecca. The stampede lasted for about two years, then, almost overnight, they left.  

But the gold they came for remains, albeit contained mostly in harder-to-reach deposits. 

Enter the proposed Coffee Gold mine, which if built could be the largest gold mine the territory has ever seen. 

Proposed by Goldcorp Kaminak Ltd., a subsidiary of Newmont (a U.S.-based multinational corporation with mines everywhere from Africa to Nevada), the Coffee Gold mine would consist of four open pits about 130 kilometres south of Dawson City next to its namesake Coffee Creek, in a relatively undeveloped area.  

The Coffee Gold mine is currently under review by the Yukon Environmental and Socio-economic Assessment Board, which just closed its second public engagement period. Here’s what you need to know about the proposal. 

How big is the Coffee Gold mine compared to other Yukon mines?

The Coffee property covers about 22,000 hectares, about half the size of Whitehorse. 

The project is expected to produce roughly 2.6 million ounces of gold during the 10 years it operates, according to the company’s proposal. While the amount of gold in the ground has yet to be confirmed, that projection could make it the largest gold mine in Yukon.

By comparison, Victoria Gold’s Eagle Gold Mine near Mayo — which is the largest gold mine in Yukon history — is expected to produce 2.1 million ounces of gold over 10 years. (It will operate for 11 years.) 

Another even larger mine is in the works, though: the Casino Mine Corporation is preparing a submission for a panel review — the most stringent type of environmental assessment — for its Casino Mine west of Carmacks, which would produce 8.9 million ounces of gold over roughly 22 years. The company also plans to mine for copper. 

The Coffee Gold project plans to employ 430 miners over the course of its life, while about 300 people work at the Eagle Gold mine. 

There are two operating mines in Yukon currently — Minto and Eagle. Coffee Gold and Casino are both under review. Map: Carol Linnitt / The Narwhal

How will the gold be extracted?

The Coffee mine would use a process called cyanide heap leach to extract gold. Basically, gold ore is crushed and placed on a large pad, which could be upward of 80 metres high in places, according to the company’s proposal. A cyanide solution is then poured over the pile to separate gold from other rock. Beneath the rock pile is a synthetic liner, which shields the environment from leakage. The cyanide is collected, then recycled until it’s needed again. 

Cyanide, a naturally occurring chemical that can be lethal at high doses, is found in many things — from cigarette smoke to pesticides. 

While the cyanide heap leach process is commonly used in mining and eliminates the need for toxic tailings ponds, that doesn’t mean there aren’t environmental concerns, said Lewis Rifkind, the mining analyst at the Yukon Conservation Society, which entered a submission to the public engagement process. Plastic liners could rupture, he said.

“That’s where the concern is, especially in the North,” he said. “We’ve got weird ground conditions, you know, discontinuous permafrost, fractured ground rock. There’s always a risk putting these things in.”

The heap leach process is used at Victoria Gold’s Eagle Mine. Rifkind said he raised similar concerns when that mine was making its way through the environmental assessment process.

Rifkind wants to know whether the Coffee project will include two liners. That way if one breaks, there will be another to catch any leaks. 

“If they’re going to use it, it has to be of the highest quality possible, the highest standard possible,” he said.

What are the impacts of disturbing permafrost?

Permafrost covers a substantial amount of land across the North. In order to build, well, pretty much anything, this has to be taken into consideration. 

In a submission to the assessment board, Newmont said permafrost disturbance is “partially reversible.”

Katarzyna Nowak, a conservation science coordinator at the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society’s Yukon chapter, said she wants to know what this means exactly — how can permafrost damage be reversible, even partially?

“This project is admitting that it’s going to disturb permafrost,” she said. “Permafrost holds huge stores of greenhouse gases like methane and carbon dioxide, which are going to be released if disturbed. It also has the potential to release pathogens.”

Nowak said possible permafrost damage should be included in baseline measurements to determine potential impacts when the mine shutters.

Will the next great pandemic come from the permafrost?

What road infrastructure would have to be built?

The Coffee Gold mine would involve building a road called the Northern Access Route, which would total 214 kilometres. Existing roads make up about 100 kilometres of it. Construction would include upgrading a matrix of roads and trails sometimes used by placer miners, who sift through rocks and gravel in riverbeds for gold. The Stewart and Yukon Rivers need to be crossed, which would entail building a new barge landing and upgrading three others.  

Rifkind said this would mean a level of access the area has never seen before, adding that anyone with two-wheel drive would be able to enter. 

This creates concerns about the introduction of invasive species and added pressure on caribou and moose populations. 

The conservation society is requesting a cumulative effects study to address these issues.

It’s unclear if taxpayers would foot the bill for the road construction.

What about the Dawson land-use plan?

The Dawson Regional Planning Commission is working on a land-use plan with the Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in First Nation and the Yukon government to determine the implications of future land use. The plan will lay out how land will be managed and monitored.

The Umbrella Final Agreement, signed in 1993 by Yukon First Nations and the Yukon and Canadian governments, sets a framework for First Nations interested in settling land claims and lays out a roadmap regarding land-use planning. Eleven of 14 Yukon First Nations (including Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in) have settled their land claims and are self-governing — meaning they can create and enact laws, for example, and have far more jurisdiction than First Nations in southern Canada, most of which fall under the Indian Act.

A resource assessment report will be released this month, according to the commission’s website.

The Yukon chapter of the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society wants the Dawson land-use plan to be completed before a decision is made about the Coffee project. 

“A plan on how First Nations and people living in Dawson agree to use the land should really come first,” Nowak told The Narwhal.

Last summer, Yukon governments, including First Nations, inked the precedent-setting Peel Watershed Regional Land Use Plan, which protects most of the watershed.   

How will the mine be powered?

Roughly 90 per cent of power in Yukon comes from hydroelectricity. The two producing hard rock mines in Yukon — Minto, a copper-gold mine about 240 kilometres northwest of Whitehorse, and Victoria Gold’s Eagle Mine — are connected to the grid, so the bulk of the power they use to fuel their operations is relatively clean. However, more remote projects that aren’t connected to the grid often have to burn fossil fuels and this would likely be the case for the Coffee mine.

Natural gas and diesel would be used to generate electricity at the mine, according to the company’s statement of scope of project submitted to the Yukon Environmental and Socio-Economic Assessment Board. Roughly 19 million kilowatt hours of energy would be used annually — enough electricity to power about 1,357 Yukon homes for an entire year. 

Newmont is harnessing renewable energy elsewhere, however. One of the company’s mines in Nevada has solar arrays that power two wireless communication sites. Its Akyem mine in Ghana has a 120-kilowatt solar plant, which cut 32,000 kilograms of carbon dioxide during a five-month period, according to Omar Jabara, a Newmont spokesperson.

Asked whether the Coffee mine would use renewable energy, Jabara said, “Currently, our focus is exploration, and as we continue to grow our knowledge, we will continue to review energy alternatives [that] will support the long-term sustainability of the project.”

The Eagle Gold Mine in central Yukon. Photo: Bighouseproductions.ca

How could the Coffee Gold mine fit into Yukon’s climate change plan?

In November, the Yukon government unveiled a plan to tackle climate change, laying the groundwork to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 30 per cent over 10 years. The final iteration of the plan is expected to be released next month.

The plan targets transportation, which accounts for about 62 per cent of emissions in Yukon, energy production and home heating, to name a few. It also sets in motion intensity-based targets for mines, which will be determined per kilotonne of emissions produced.

There’s too much wiggle room with these mine-specific targets, said Rifkind, because if production ramps up, so too do greenhouse gas emissions.

This is why the Coffee project doesn’t align with the aspirations of the plan, he said.

“We’re trying to get overall greenhouse gas emissions down. If we go to intensity targets, we could end up in a situation where our greenhouse gases go through the roof, especially if some very large mines come online like Casino.”

“As long as your emissions keep going up, you’re not addressing the core issue. We’ve introduced an economic argument into what is an environmental issue.” 

Do local communities have concerns about Coffee Gold?

The Narwhal recently reported that another mine project in Yukon is stoking concern among First Nations leaders. Ann Maje Raider, the executive director of the Liard Aboriginal Women’s Society, said the proposed Kudz Ze Kayah mine could negatively impact First Nations women and girls if issues aren’t addressed.

There are similar concerns when it comes to the Coffee Gold mine.

Aja Mason, director of Yukon Status of Women Council, said a greater influx of transient, male workers in the area could lead to a spike in violence against women. 

“The Yukon territory has some of the highest rates of domestic and sexualized violence reported across the country. It’s already sort of a tinder box for domestic violence. That insight applies to any type of extractive project in the Yukon.”

The organization submitted feedback to the assessment board, pointing out that Carmacks and Dawson “have some of the highest rates of reported drug, alcohol, domestic and sexualized violence in Yukon.”

The project is near three communities — Dawson City, Carmacks and Destruction Bay. The closest women’s shelter is in Dawson, Mason said. 

“If you’re living in Carmacks, that’s like a four-hour drive,” she said.

Mason wants to see a social remediation fund established by Newmont to create more support services for women and girls in the area. She also wants the company to spearhead regular training sessions regarding the history of violence and colonization in Yukon, along with ongoing anti-harassment and anti-sexualized-violence training. A third-party monitoring program should be established to track possible impacts of the project, especially against Indigenous women, she said.

In 2018, Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in signed a collaboration agreement with Goldcorp. Baked into it are assurances such as jobs for citizens and environmental protections.

“I think for the most part the major issues have been addressed,” Chief Roberta Joseph told The Narwhal, noting that the First Nation worked with the company prior to submitting an application to the assessment body. “It’s an ongoing process because from time to time there are changes that need to be reviewed.”

Issues that have been addressed between the company and First Nation include ensuring adequate data collection and reclamation plans, Joseph said. 

According to the proposal, reclamation plans involve annual water monitoring, capping the heap leach operation and installing boulders at pits.  

Yukon First Nations leaders fear mine will increase violence against women in ‘land of the caribou’

Where is the project at in the environmental assessment process?

The environmental assessment process can be best characterized as a long round of pinball, with information going back and forth between the company, the public, First Nations, NGOs and government departments. Eventually, the Yukon Environmental and Socio-economic Assessment Board makes a recommendation to governments, which they can accept or reject.

When it comes to the Coffee Gold mine, this pinball game has lasted about three years already. Prior to being bought by Newmont, Goldcorp first submitted a project application in 2017, with a public comment period in 2018.  

The project underwent significant project changes last year, spurring another public comment period, which closed in March. Those changes included increasing the rate of production and revising the rock storage plans, Yeomans said. The assessment body went back to the company on April 29 with 44 requests for more information to address outstanding issues.

“The ball is now in their court to go through these questions and supply the information,” Yeomans said, adding that Newmont has upward of two years to provide more information.   

“We don’t expect it to be that long.”

The assessment body is in the process of completing a draft screening report, which will encapsulate public comments and additional information supplied by the company — providing the clearest picture of the project to date and identifying outstanding issues.

Yeomans said all comments gleaned during the public engagement period are being considered.

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.

In November 2019, 50 scientists from around the world assembled at Herrenhausen Palace in Hannover, Germany, to talk through an emerging threat to public health: “zombie” viruses and microbes emerging from the thawing ground.

The frozen earth that covers much of the Arctic is home to growing microbial communities. For centuries, they had lain dormant, barely active or completely suspended, subsisting on minuscule pockets of water squeezed between the ice. With the Arctic warming at two to five times the global average, those pockets are becoming pools; rivulets, rivers; and puddles, ponds. The Arctic is waking up, and the microscopic organisms embedded in the land are coming back to life. 

The scientists in Germany agreed the climate is warming and the permafrost is thawing. But they wanted to know what it all means for humans and the future of infectious disease. 

“The impetus from the meeting was [determining] what’s going to thaw out of the permafrost and kill us,” says Susan Kutz, a professor of ecosystem public health at the University of Calgary and one of the scientists at the Hannover meeting. 

‘A gigantic reservoir of ancient microbes or viruses’

In a 2017 paper, a team of Belgian researchers describe the threats to human health from microbes that were previously frozen in permafrost. 

“Over the past few years, there has been increasing evidence that the permafrost is a gigantic reservoir of ancient microbes or viruses that may come back to life if environmental conditions change and set them free again,” the authors write.

The paper describes a separate study in which two viruses emerged from a single sample of 700-year-old caribou droppings. They were both able to be resurrected.

In 2014, scientists discovered a giant virus (a classification only discovered a decade earlier) frozen in a 30,000-year-old ice core. Like a scene out of a sci-fi movie, the scientists thawed it and watched it take over an amoeba. 

The scientists concluded in a paper that their ability to resurrect the virus suggests that thawing permafrost — as a result of global warming or industrial exploitation of circumpolar regions — might pose a threat to human or animal health.

Evolutionary ecologist Ellen Decaestecker, who co-authored the 2017 paper, says the increasing encroachment of people into natural areas worldwide is presenting new opportunities for health crises. 

“We are changing the environment very fast at this moment in terms of habitat fragmentation and climate change,” she says, adding that people are also travelling more and more (or at least they were before COVID-19 hit). “The chance that [an outbreak] happens as a result of the combination of these factors is quite high.” 

The viruses and microbes may also present another problem: they could contain the blueprints for resistance to antibiotics or other medicines. If given the chance, they could share that information with their modern relatives.

The world became aware of the infectious risk in the permafrost when an outbreak of anthrax occurred in the Yamal Peninsula in Siberia during the warm summer of 2016. Thousands of reindeer and a child died, while dozens of people were hospitalized with bacterial infections. Headlines blared that this was the start of a new wave of frozen diseases that would not only reawaken but infect and kill people. 

The reality, as is often the case, is a little more nuanced. 

A recently published paper suggests that a Russian anthrax vaccination program for reindeer that was halted in 2007 probably played a bigger role in the outbreak than a warm summer. The reindeer that died may have been the first cohort without the vaccination to be exposed to the bacterium, which can survive for hundreds of years in the soil. 

While the permafrost theory shouldn’t be discarded entirely, it “might be a bit oversimplified,” says study lead author Karsten Hueffer, a veterinary microbiologist at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. 

But the risk of thawing permafrost runs deeper than the re-emergence of old diseases: a warmer Arctic brings brand new problems with it. 

‘Bigger fish to fry’

Zombie viruses make for attention-grabbing headlines. But for the people living in the Arctic, infectious diseases that come from more mundane sources could pose a much greater threat. 

“I really think that with climate change, we probably have — to put it flippantly — bigger fish to fry here,” Hueffer says.

Climate change and human intrusions are changing the landscape, opening up new ways for microbes to get around and infect animals and humans. 

New roads, new mines and new drilling programs are bringing more people to the Arctic than ever before, just as the soil is beginning to offer a multitude of freshly virulent germs. 

The same warming is inviting new species north — some of which are hosts for pathogens that can infect humans. Drinking water straight out of Arctic streams and lakes, common practice in many places, is becoming more risky as beavers push farther into the North. Beavers are hosts to parasites like Giardia, which causes “beaver fever,” a painful, diarrhea-inducing abdominal sickness. Mosquitoes carrying West Nile virus are being found farther and farther north as well. This is adding stress to the thinly spread medical systems of the North.

“I’m concerned about the fact that we don’t understand — and we very, very likely underestimate — the effect of infectious disease on wildlife,” Kutz says. 

If wildlife is affected, humans can be affected, too. Diseases can jump from animals to humans and deplete animal food sources people rely on. 

Almost every herd of caribou, for instance, is declining precipitously across North America. Kutz says the role infectious disease is playing in that decline may have been overlooked, and climate change is feeding the fire. 

Meanwhile, the infrastructure used to transport sewage is built on rapidly thawing and heaving ground. Pipes can rupture and spill, causing outbreaks of waterborne diseases.

“The ways people have dealt with human waste may not now be appropriate,” Hueffer says. 

The final report of the meeting in Hannover hasn’t been released yet. But the general consensus, according to Kutz, was that we don’t need to worry about a disease as contagious and deadly as COVID-19 coming out of the permafrost based on what’s been seen so far — but there are other reasons to be concerned.  

The thawing permafrost may be home to bacteria and viruses we haven’t yet encountered — or, troublingly, ones that we have encountered with disastrous results, such as the Spanish flu or smallpox — but much of their DNA is in fragments, is adapted to infect other creatures or likely won’t come into contact with humans.

The key, Kutz says, will be to watch the wildlife, and that’s what she is doing: her lab works in collaboration with Indigenous harvesters across the Arctic to keep an eye on animal health.

“If you think about the wildlife, their noses are in the grass, they’re digging in the dirt,” she says. “They’re the sentinels.”

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By Ed Struzik. This article was originally published on Yale Environment 360.

Canadian scientist Philip Marsh and I were flying along the coast of the Beaufort Sea, where the frozen tundra had recently opened up into a crater the size of a football stadium.

Located along the shoreline of an unnamed lake, the so-called thaw slump was gray, muddy, and barren, in sharp contrast to the brilliant russet and gold of the surrounding autumn tundra. These retrogressive thaw slumps, or landslides — formed as warming temperatures rapidly thaw permafrost — are increasing across the Arctic, including the kilometere-long, 100-meter-deep Batagaika Crater in the Yana River Basin of Siberia.

The tundra of the western Canadian Arctic has long been carpeted in cranberries, blueberries, cloudberries, shrubs, sedges, and lichen that have provided abundant food for grizzly bears, caribou, and other animals.

Now, however, as permafrost thaws and slumping expands, parts of that landscape are being transformed into nothing but mud, silt, and peat, blowing off massive amounts of climate-warming carbon that have been stored in the permafrost for millennia.

A permafrost slump, the size of a football stadium, on the shore of an unnamed lake in the Canadian Arctic. Photo: Ed Struzik / Yale Environment 360

If this had happened in an urban area, it would have resulted in dozens of buildings being swallowed up.

If it had happened along a pipeline right-of-way, it might have resulted in an environmental disaster.

Arctic fastest-warming region on Earth

As the Arctic warms faster than any region on Earth, public attention has largely been focused on the rapid disappearance of Arctic sea ice. But major changes are also taking place on land, and one of the most striking is the thawing of vast swaths of permafrost that have underlain these polar regions for millennia.

That thaw is taking a toll in complex ways that are not clearly understood, and scientists such as Marsh are now intensifying efforts to grasp how these changes will play out this century and beyond.

The landscape slumps into the water. Photo: Roger MacLeod / Natural Resources Canada

Exposed permafrost. Photo: Roger MacLeod / Natural Resources Canada

What we do know is that if the Arctic continues to warm as quickly as climatologists are predicting, an estimated 2.5 million square miles of permafrost — 40 per cent of the world’s total — could disappear by the end of the century, with enormous consequences. The most alarming is expected to be the release of huge stores of greenhouse gases, including methane, carbon dioxide, and nitrous oxide that have remained locked in the permafrost for ages. Pathogens will also be released.

But less well appreciated are the sweeping landscape changes that will alter tundra ecosystems, making it increasingly difficult for subsistence Indigenous people, such as the Inuit, and Arctic animals to find food.

‘Beyond what our instruments can tell us’: merging Indigenous knowledge and Western science at the edge of the world

‘The frozen ground literally falls apart’

The disintegration of subterranean ice that glues together the peat, clay, rocks, sand, and other inorganic minerals is now triggering landslides and slumping at alarming rates, resulting in stream flows changing, lakes suddenly draining, seashores collapsing, and water chemistry being altered in ways that could be deleterious to both humans and wildlife.

“We’re seeing slumping along shorelines that can drain most of the water in a lake in just days and even hours,” says Marsh, a former Canadian government scientist who is now a professor of hydrology at Wilfrid Laurier University in Ontario.

“It’s not surprising when you consider that as much as 80 per cent of the ground here consists of frozen water. When that ice melts, the frozen ground literally falls apart.”

Coastal erosion reveals the extent of ice-rich permafrost underlying the active layer on the Arctic Coastal Plain in the Teshekpuk Lake Special Area of the National Petroleum Reserve, Alaska. Photo: Brandt Meixell / USGS

As a result, says Marsh, Indigenous communities, the resource industry, and the government need to better understand how a warming climate is impacting water resources and permafrost ecosystems.”

As the helicopter pilot circled Marsh’s research site searching for a dry spot to land, I could see the Husky Lakes in the distance. This is a unique treeline/tundra transitional zone where grizzly bears have been known to kill or mate with polar bears and where sea-going belugas swim into brackish inland lakes.

From the helicopter, the research camp below looked like a stick man.

Aerial view of the Trail Valley Creek research station in the western Canadian Arctic, situated along the Mackenzie Delta. Photo: Ed Struzik / Yale Environment 360

Narrow wooden boardwalks connect weather stations, snow, and rain gauges, and instruments that determine how much carbon dioxide, nitrous oxide, and methane are being absorbed by tundra plants and how much of these gases is being emitted into the atmosphere. The boardwalks were laid down so that the scientists’ boots won’t disturb the thawing peat and permafrost or skew the recordings.

Solar panels and a back-up generator kept everything powered, including an electrified fence designed to keep out both grizzly and polar bears.

Marsh, who has conducted field work in the Arctic for more than four decades, established this research station in Trail Valley Creek in 1991. Not only is it situated in the most rapidly warming region on Earth, but it is also the site of a new Arctic highway, hundreds of now-dormant exploratory oil and gas drilling sites, and some of the most important bird nesting territory in the Arctic.

Like all permafrost scientists, he and his colleagues have worked in arduous conditions, fighting off hordes of biting flies and mosquitoes in the summer, and measuring snowpack and ground temperatures in bitter winter cold.

Branden Walker, a researcher from Wilfrid Laurier University, gathers data from a weather station on the tundra in the Northwest Territories. Photo: Ed Struzik / Yale Environment 360

One of the largest carbon sinks in the world

Marsh’s research in the Canadian Arctic has already led him to conclude that climate warming will result in hydrological changes this century that will dry up 15,000 of the 45,000 lakes in the Mackenzie River Delta, one of the largest deltas in the world.

He also expects to see more of what Antoni Lewkowicz, a geographer and permafrost expert at the University of Ottawa, is seeing father north on Banks Island in the High Arctic of Canada. Lewkowicz recently reported a 60-fold increase in slumping along 288 lakes that he has monitored with satellite imagery from 1984 to 2015.

Slumping can occur with sudden catastrophic force.

In one notable case that was captured on time-lapse photography in 2015 by Steve Kokelj, a permafrost expert with the Northwest Territories Geological Survey, a rapidly thawing cliff bordering the shores of a tundra lake collapsed into the Peel River watershed in the Northwest Territories. The waterfall that was created drained approximately 800,000 gallons of water from that upland lake in just two hours.

Heavy metals in the permafrost, such as mercury, were flushed downstream along with silt and peat, tainting the river system for miles downstream.

Permafrost occurs in areas where the temperature of the ground remains below the freezing mark for two years or more. About a quarter of the Northern Hemisphere’s landscape fits this definition.

Most of the world’s permafrost is found in northern Russia, Canada, Alaska, Iceland, and Scandinavia. Much of it underlies peat ecosystems. But like peat, permafrost is also found in the Rocky Mountains of Canada and Alaska, the Alps, the Himalayas, the high-altitude Patagonia region of South America, and the high country of New Zealand.

The rapid thawing of permafrost has enormous implications for climate change. There are an estimated 1,400 gigatons of carbon frozen in permafrost, making the Arctic one of the largest carbon sinks in the world. That’s about four times more than humans have emitted since the Industrial Revolution, and nearly twice as much as is currently contained in the atmosphere.

According to a recent report, a 3.6-degrees Fahrenheit ( 2 degrees Celsius) increase in temperature — expected by the end of the century — will result in a loss of about 40 per cent of the world’s permafrost by 2100.

Greenhouse gases on the tundra are released in two ways. As permafrost thaws, once-dormant microorganisms break down organic matter, allowing methane and carbon to be released in the atmosphere. Thawing can also open pathways for methane to rise up from reservoirs deep in the earth.

The Mackenzie River system is Canada’s largest watershed, and the tenth largest water basin in the world. Parts of the watershed sit atop permafrost, which makes the area vulnerable to climate change. Photo: Joshua Stevens / NASA Earth Observatory

Once-dormant pathogens coming back to life?

The permafrost thawing that is leading to the release of greenhouse gases is intensifying across the Arctic.

Much of the permafrost degradation that has occurred on Canada’s Banks Island took place after some of the warmest years on record, according to Lewkowicz.

In 1984, the island had 60 active slumps. By 2013, there were 4,000. Lewkowicz expects that the island may see as many as 30,000 new active slumps in the coming years.

This thawing will have a profound impact on the flow and chemistry of lakes and streams, as well as those parts of the Arctic Ocean into which rivers drain. Lewkowicz’s satellite data, for example, shows that the colour of many of the lakes on Banks Island has changed from blue to turquoise, indicating that the once-clear water has become filled with sediments.

Scientists suspect that some of the slumping may be giving new life to pathogens capable of killing muskoxen, caribou, and nesting birds as warmer temperatures nudge the pathogens out of their dormant state. Massive die-offs of muskoxen on Banks and Victoria islands in Canada, as well as reindeer in Siberia, appear to be related to once-dormant pathogens that are coming back to life.

Scientists are also finding that hundreds of sumps excavated by the oil and gas industry in the 1970s and 1980s are now thawing. Toxic petroleum waste that was supposed to be permanently contained in 200 frozen pits in the Mackenzie Delta, for example, is migrating into nearby freshwater ecosystems.

At Trail Valley Creek, Carolina Voigt, a post-doctoral geography researcher, and Oliver Sonnentag, a hydrologist at the University of Montreal, are using manual and automated sensors to measure how climate change affects greenhouse gas activity on the tundra.

Evan Wilcox, a geography PhD candidate at Wilfrid Laurier University, has made important discoveries about the role that the rapid expansion of shrubs in the Arctic — the result of rising temperatures — is playing in the thawing of permafrost. All across the warming Arctic, shrubs are expanding into tundra where grasses, sedges, and lichens once prevailed. Not only are the taller shrubs shading out the smaller plants below, they are also changing the hydrology of the ecosystem.

“We’re finding that the date when snow melts is the key to determining the rate at which the active-layer permafrost thaws,” says Wilcox. “The snow in tundra areas where you have shrubs such as dwarf birch tends to melt a week earlier than it does in areas where there are no shrubs. This results in more permafrost thawing. As the shrubs expand into the tundra, we’re likely to see an acceleration of thawing.”

Researchers Evan Wilcox (left) and Niels Weiss extract ice-rich permafrost cores from the tundra. Photo: Ed Struzik / Yale Environment 360

Evan Wilcox holds a permafrost core sample. Photo: Ed Struzik / Yale Environment 360

Wilcox bores steel probes — as many as 3,000 one recent summer — into the ground to determine the depths of ground thaw.

Arduous as that is, Niels Weiss, a postdoctoral fellow working with Marsh, has a much tougher time hammering into the solid ice to get the sample he needs to determine how much and what kind of organic material is contained in the permafrost.

Weiss has conducted permafrost research in Siberia, Scandinavia, and Canada, and he and others have found that carbon storage and the ways gas is released from these ecosystems depend on a variety of factors such as soil composition, groundwater flow, and whether trees, shrubs, or grasses are predominant.

What’s clear, he says, is that even in the coldest places in the Arctic, permafrost is thawing at accelerating rates.

Although much remains to be discovered about the impacts of thawing permafrost in the region, Marsh says one thing is becoming increasingly clear: In the coming decades, the tundra landscape will look much different than it does now.

That change was evident as we bushwhacked through 8-foot-high willows en route to retrieve a water gauge swept away during the spring flood. Thirty years ago, lichen and sedges dominated this landscape. Today, willows and shrubs are proliferating across the tundra. Abundant caribou once fed on the lichen, their numbers on the Tuktoyaktuk Peninsula hitting 3,000 in 2006. Now, only half that number remain.

The world’s longest border is moving

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Lakes, ponds and streams cover a large fraction of the low-lying tundra that circles the Arctic. For example, roughly 65,000 lakes and ponds lie within the Mackenzie Delta and an area to its east.

Lakes across this terrain often exist because of the impermeable nature of the permafrost around and below these lakes. Some of this permafrost has existed here since the last ice age.

Yet as the climate warms, this permafrost is at risk of thawing for the first time in tens of thousands of years. Permafrost thaw has already caused some of these lakes to drain and dry up, and others to expand. Dramatic changes over the last 70 years have been well documented through air photos and satellite images.

These lakes are linked by a vast network of rivers and streams, and are important habitat for large populations of migratory birds, fish and mammals. They are also vital to the lives of northerners, who use them for hunting, fishing, trapping, transportation, fresh water and recreation.

With increasing evidence of ecosystem destruction around the world related to the changing climate, there is also increasing concern that unique Arctic freshwater ecosystems are under threat.

Disappearing lakes

Lakes controlled by the presence of permafrost can drain rapidly if the permafrost gives way, a process called catastrophic lake drainage. Sometimes an entire lake can drain in as little as a day, like the one that we studied after it vanished from the landscape north of Inuvik, N.W.T., in 16 hours in August 1989.

The disappearance of this lake occurred as water seeped through cracks that had formed in ice wedges during the previous winter. The relatively warm lake water melted the ice within the permafrost, creating a new outlet channel.

Lake drainage presents a serious safety risk to hunters or fishers who may be downstream. It also destroys freshwater habitat, quickly converting it to land, and expands, or even forms, new stream channels.

Like many impacts of climate change on the Arctic, however, unexpected changes also occur. After our initial studies of draining lakes, we expected to find the number of lakes draining annually across this region would increase as the climate warmed.

An exceptionally warm summer in 2004 triggered this 300-metre-long slump associated with thawing permafrost In Noatak National Preserve, Alaska. Photo: National Parks Service / Flickr

Instead, we found lake drainage in this area had decreased by one-third between 1950 and 2000. This decrease is likely due to fewer extremely cold winter days that are needed for ice wedge cracking to occur over the winter.

Yet as warming continues, the upper layer of the soil that thaws each year is expected to get deeper and will likely lead to more lake drainage events. An increase in lake drainage has already been reported in Siberia, and this is likely the long-term future of many Arctic lowland lakes.

Expanding lakes

Other lowland lakes are expanding as ice in the lake shoreline melts. New lakes may also appear in the tundra depressions that form as ice-rich permafrost thaws, creating new aquatic habitat. Changes like this have been seen in Siberia, but they haven’t been observed in the Inuvik region yet.

This thawing of ice-rich permafrost, called thermokarst, results in changes in water chemistry and increases in water clarity. These changes will likely affect aquatic food webs in ways that are still poorly understood.

Three core sections from the upper metre of permafrost at a site north of Inuvik, N.W.T. White material is ice embedded in the permafrost. Photo: Niels Weiss

The Arctic is warming at two to three times the rate of the global average. But determining where the permafrost will thaw — in what way and how quickly — is a complicated puzzle affected by many factors.

For example, there are an increasing number of shrubs growing on the tundra. This affects the accumulation of blowing snow, and may speed up or slow down the rate of snow melt and shorten or lengthen the number of snow-free days. All of this affects permafrost thaw and freshwater systems.

Millennia of change ahead

Scientific organizations, governments and international groups around the world have all recently warned of the alarming impacts climate change is having — and will have — on the Arctic. Thawing permafrost is already destabilizing buildings, roads and airstrips, eroding coastlines and releasing more carbon into the atmosphere.

It is critically important to realize that permafrost thaw will not stop once the global climate has stabilized, whether at the Paris Agreement limits of 1.5C or 2C, or at much higher levels. Even if anthropogenic carbon emissions are reduced over the coming decades, the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will remain above pre-industrial levels for centuries — and likely millennia. Temperatures will also remain high.

As long as the global average temperature stays above the pre-industrial average, permafrost will continue to thaw, ground ice will melt, the land will subside, lakes and streams and freshwater ecosystems will change dramatically, with devastating effects on the peoples of the Arctic who have used these freshwater systems for generations.

Over the next year, governments will make decisions that will limit the increase in global temperature to below 1.5C or allow global warming to further increase to 2C or more. Our decisions will impact the Arctic and the globe for generations.

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“First, we are going to check out the berries,” Obie David James Anikina says. 

It’s a warm, buggy day out on the tundra about 10 kilometres outside of Tuktoyaktuk in the Northwest Territories. The height of summer brings a lush green to these parts.

I follow Anikina and Eriel Lugt through knee-high shrubbery and after a short walk we arrive at a marked blueberry patch. 

Eriel pulls out an iPad and a camera, takes notes and a few photos, before we move on to known patches of cloudberries. Then to wild rhubarb.

Climate monitor Eriel Lugt measures the height of wild rhubarb. The information she collects will provide insight into the effect climate change is having on edible plants around Tuktoyaktuk. Photo: Weronika Murray / The Narwhal

Anikina and Lugt are a part of the local climate change monitoring team working under the umbrella of the Tuktoyaktuk Community Climate Resilience Project, launched in 2018 by Tuktoyaktuk Community Corporation. 

The project, currently funded by Crown-Indigenous Relations and Northern Affairs Canada, is an inter-agency effort to establish a community-based monitoring program that would allow for long term, continuous measurements of climate change indicators. 

That’s where the berries come in. The warming climate is moving ecological borders, changing and endangering unique plant life in the tundra.  

The monitoring program is a method of monitoring the easily overlooked ways the world is being altered by a new climate reality. 

But it’s also designed to act as a knowledge-sharing platform in which Western science-based research and traditional knowledge can compliment each other. Community participation is built into the program to ensure the needs and values of local Indigenous people are recognized and integrated in the monitoring and field work.

Obie David James Anikina and Eriel Lugt collect edible plant yield data in a blueberry patch along the Inuvik-Tuktoyaktuk Highway. Photo: Weronika Murray / The Narwhal

Gathering ‘quantitative data’ might sound like a dry, technical endeavour. But when it’s done to measure ice thickness, the days of the month when ice forms or thaws, the turbidity of water, permafrost depth and the leaf and bloom dates of edible plants, it amounts to work that for remote northern communities can touch on pressing issues of life and death.

On a regular basis, eight monitors armed with technical training through the Aurora Research Institute in Inuvik head out to gather data. They also join up with visiting researchers to broaden their fieldwork experience and learn new skills.

Tuktoyaktuk, an Inuvialuit community of about 950 people, may become the first community in Canada to face the possibility of relocation due to the impact of global warming. Already known as a place at the edge of the world, areas of Tuktoyaktuk are at risk of disappearing altogether. 

According to a report from W.F. Baird & Associates Coastal Engineers, more than half of the north end of Tuktoyaktuk Peninsula, locally known as “The Point,” is expected to be gone by the end of the century.

The vanishing point: life on the edge of the melting world

Despite valiant efforts to protect the shore from erosion over the last few decades, the ocean keeps advancing inland due to climate change driven factors like a shorter ice season, rising sea levels and permafrost thaw. 

Less sea ice in summer months means increased “fetch” — the area of open water where prevailing winds can create higher, more destructive waves. 

That, combined with the rising sea level, puts Tuktoyaktuk at risk of flooding, especially during storms.

“Coastal erosion gets all the press because it makes for dramatic photos. But flooding is just as big of a problem,” says Dustin Whalen, physical scientist with Natural Resources Canada who has been conducting research in the community for over a decade. 

A storm batters the windward shore of “The Point,” an area of Tuktoyaktuk heavily affected by shore erosion. Photo: Weronika Murray / The Narwhal

While Tuktoyaktuk’s future is uncertain, its residents urgently need the ability to make well-informed decisions when considering long-term solutions. This is where the community-based climate change monitoring can really make a difference. 

For Whalen, who sits on the advisory board for the Tuktoyaktuk Community Climate Resilience Project, the value of the program lies in continuous and reliable data collecting. 

“Without continuous monitoring you can’t create models. We can take the data [collected by the local monitors] and help the community model how the environment is going to evolve. Research and monitoring led by the community, for the community, is an important way forward to ensure that people are better prepared to deal with the changing climate.” 

How to build resilient communities in the face of a climate-disrupted reality is of increasing interest to researchers worldwide.

A storm surge enters Tuktoyaktuk harbour during the early hours of a storm on August 4, 2019. Shore erosion and flooding are the two main threats the community faces due to climate change. Weronika Murray / The Narwhal

Michael Lim from Northumbria University in Newcastle, England, has been working in Tuktoyaktuk for the past three years to study the way changing climate conditions threatens infrastructure. 

He agrees that continuous monitoring can help fill the gaps in data collecting.

“As researchers we are so often on short-term funding and have such limited time to conduct studies, which has led to often piecemeal and fragmented advances,” Lim says. 

“The community-based monitoring can provide a genuinely different approach with continued studies in key areas. In addition, we always gain invaluable new understanding through the wealth of local knowledge and intimate connection that Indigenous communities have with the land and its wildlife, and their approaches to cope with its changes, far beyond what our instruments can tell us.”

Charlotte Irish (centre), community based monitoring program coordinator, collects water samples at Peninsula Point with Gwénaëlle Chaillou, professor of marine chemistry at Université du Québec à Rimouski (left), and Lauren Kipp, post-doctoral researcher from the Ocean Frontier Institute. Photo: Weronika Murray / Pingo Canadian Landmark / The Narwhal

Monitoring program coordinator, Charlotte Irish, says her engagement with the research program has been a jarring experience. 

“Seeing all the changes happening to our land amazes and terrifies me,” she says.

Prior to her work as a monitor, Irish says she wasn’t aware of the extent to which the region has already been impacted by climate change.

“Now that I’ve had opportunities to work with researchers and see what’s happening to our land, it’s something that keeps me going and makes me want to learn and see more. As a community, eventually we will have to learn how to adapt to this situation.” 

There have also been unexpected benefits of the monitoring program to the community more broadly.

Climate monitor Deva-Lynn Pokiak says that getting local residents involved in the research is having a positive ripple effect.

Climate monitor Deva-Lynn Pokiak believes that getting the community involved in research can get more youth interested in science and climate change issues. Photo: Weronika Murray / The Narwhal

“I try to be a good influence around the youth. They see me working with scientists and they think it’s cool, and they also want to get involved,” Pokiak says. “It’s good to get them interested in learning.” 

For Eriel Lugt, just 17, the issue of climate change hits — very literally — close to home.

A growing undercut in the shoreline threatens her family’s home, which overlooks Tuktoyaktuk’s inner harbour.

Despite numerous attempts to protect Tuktoyaktuk’s windward shore with man-made reinforcements, the community is losing ground to the destructive force of the waves. Noella Cockney’s home is one of four buildings listed for urgent relocation further inland due to progressing shore erosion. Weronika Murray / The Narwhal

Lugt says she initially signed up for the monitoring program because she thought it would be interesting to learn more about her community and the processes that affect it. But now she recognizes a more pressing need for youth to participate in local climate resiliency initiatives. 

“Young people should make themselves heard more, show that we actually care, that it’s not a joke,” she says. “Get out on the land and see the changes for yourselves. We have to learn to work together because we will all have to pay the price for climate change.” 

When asked about the emotional impact of facing dramatic changes in the landscape, Lugt’s mind extends to both the far past and future: “It makes me wonder what our elders would think about this. It’s sad to think that this is all going to be gone.”

The impacts of thawing permafrost on the surrounding environment aren’t yet fully known. 

But other compounding environmental concerns — around ocean acidification and its effects on marine life as well as elevated concentrations of mercury in fish and wildlife — add to the pressure felt by locals.

In a community that depends on harvesting from the land for its traditional food supply, the overlapping changes point to an increasingly precarious future.

“The ocean takes longer to freeze,” Pokiak says. “It’s strange how we are having different weather than what my dad used to experience when he was my age.”

“It’s getting harder to rely on traditional knowledge because the weather has changed so much. Climate change is real and inevitable, and I hope that through my work I can make a difference for future generations.” 

In a lot of ways, Tuktoyaktuk is on the front line of threats that are heading for more and more communities. The experience here is an important reminder that wherever we live, we depend on our environment to sustain us, and climate change may alter that environment and jeopardize our way of life — in ways we can anticipate and in ways we can’t.

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