Waves that are projected to get much larger by the end of the century in the Arctic could be “catastrophic” to the hamlet of Tuktoyaktuk, according to the community’s mayor.

The Inuvialuit community of about 900 people in the Northwest Territories has been losing ground to the battering Beaufort Sea for decades. The hamlet has been forced to relocate houses on The Point, a peninsula jutting off the coast, as the shore crept closer and closer to residents’ doors.

Tuktoyaktuk has installed boulder walls, material coverings called “rip-rap” and cement slabs along the coast to try to prevent erosion, but another factor is working against them: permafrost thaw. Between the thawing frozen ground and crashing waves, the coastline in the area is eroding by an average of up to two metres per year — and much more in some areas.

And it could get worse.

New research published this month in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Oceans shows that maximum wave heights across the Arctic Ocean, which encompasses the Beaufort Sea, could be upward of six metres higher on average within this century, leading to even more erosion and flooding. 

Along the Beaufort coast, wave heights could increase by two to three times, putting them in the range of one to four metres high by the end of the century, said Mercè Casas-Prat, the lead author of the study and researcher with Environment and Climate Change Canada’s research division.

“This is a pressing issue as it affects many Arctic coastal communities, as well as existing and emerging Arctic infrastructure and activities, with some of them having already suffered severe wave-induced damage in the past years,” the report said.

This includes the community of Tuktoyaktuk, which relies on those same powerful waters for hunting and fishing, and which, up until the opening of the Inuvik-Tuk Highway in 2017, was connected to the rest of the country only by air and ice road in the winter and water in the summer. Tuktoyaktuk’s harbour remains the hub of the community, an important access point for boats and is an area under increasing threat.

“I hope that we’re being taken seriously here,” said Tuktoyaktuk Mayor Erwin Elias.“At the end of the day, it’s the people we’re concerned about, but we also have a culture that we have to try to take care of and preserve.” 

“It’s definitely worrisome for us here.”  

Extreme wave events predicted to be more frequent and intense

Climate change is causing Arctic sea ice to gradually disappear, with the region projected to be entirely ice free by the end of the century, Casas-Prat said. Less ice means greater “fetch” — or larger areas of open water where waves are generated due to exposure to winds. And these waters are staying open for longer periods.

As well as increasing fetch across the ocean, less ice at the shoreline means that buttress for waves is lost, just when it’s needed.

“Potentially hazardous extreme wave events are projected to become significantly more frequent and more intense,” the report said.

Tuktoyaktuk from air, August 2018. Photo: Weronika Murray

Extreme weather, considered a once-in-20-year event between 1979 and 2005, the report said, will occur every two to five years by the end of the century.

The study covers all latitudes above the 60th parallel, including the Beaufort Sea, which stretches from the Northwest Territories, over Yukon to northern Alaska. Researchers used wind and sea ice information from climate models to obtain historical wave conditions between 1979 and 2005 and to predict conditions between 2081 and 2100. 

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

Strong winds will result in bigger waves in the future as more water opens up, Casas-Prat said. This will be particularly perilous during the fall, when storm surges typically hammer the region. 

“The earth is becoming exposed to a new wave climate,” Casas-Prat said. “This can be an issue because Arctic coastlines are already experiencing a large rate of erosion. This gets worse in the future.”

“We need to start thinking seriously about possible adaptation strategies for those areas in the North.” 

New funding announced to help Tuktoyaktuk adapt to climate change

Erosion in Tuktoyaktuk has been a problem for years and efforts to reinforce the coastline have seen varying success. 

On July 10, the federal government announced $5.5 million in funding for climate change adaptation strategies and clean energy projects in the community. The bulk of it — $3.6 million — will go toward shoring up the community to erosion. 

“But we’re only starting now,” Elias said, noting the community is playing catch-up in finding long-term solutions to the impacts of climate change it’s experiencing. 

Concrete mat shore protection installed along Tuktoyaktuk’s coast in 2015. Photo: by S. Solomon / Arctic Coastal Dynamics

The community’s roads, for example, flood every year due to high water levels, Elias said. “It’s been over 30 years since we last did anything with our roads.”  

Part of the money from federal coffers is going to raising roads in the community, he said, with construction beginning this week. The $1.2 million for roads this year doesn’t go far enough, however, Elias said, adding that the community needs about $12 million to complete road upgrades throughout the entire community. 

This could take years to complete, he said, and the community is running out of time. 

Just off the mainland shore, Tuktoyaktuk Island extends about a kilometre in the Beaufort Sea, acting as a natural breakwater for the community’s harbour. But it also hangs in jeopardy. As a result of waves and storm surges, the island erodes more than two metres per year, further exposing the land behind it to those forces. 

“If we lose the island, then we will lose our harbour,”  Elias said. “We’re trying to figure out a way to protect all that. That’s where we are today.”

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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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By Edward Struzik

This article was originally published on The Conversation Canada.

Northwest Territories Premier Bob McLeod was right when he issued a “red alert” in November and called for an urgent national debate on the future of the Northwest Territories. His peers, the premiers of Nunavut and the Yukon Territory, would be justified in calling for the same thing.

As housing, poverty and unemployment statistics show, Northerners are at a crossroads in their efforts to find a balance between a traditional way of life that puts country food on the table and one that provides basic goods, luxuries and economic opportunities that most southerners take for granted.

McLeod, however, was wrong in complaining about a “colonial” attack on the future of oil and gas development in the Arctic.

If the past tells us anything about the future, forging the Arctic’s future on fossil fuel development is not the way to move forward.

Leading energy experts have been saying this since 2006, when international energy consultants Wood Mackenzie and Fugro Robertson questioned “the long-considered view that the Arctic represents one of the last great oil and gas frontiers and a strategic energy supply cache” for the U.S. and Canada.

Sliding into the sea

In Canada, Arctic oil and gas has offered no significant returns since the late 1960s when the Canadian government engineered a plan to consolidate the interests of 75 companies with holdings in the Arctic. As a major shareholder in Panarctic Oil and Gas, and then Petro-Canada, the government used its resources, regulatory control and taxpayer money to encourage oil and gas exploration in the region.

Since then, government subsidization of Arctic oil and gas development has continued unabated at a very high cost.

In 2008, the federal government launched a program to bring petroleum geologists to the Arctic each year. To date, this program has spent nearly $200 million of taxpayers’ money to help the energy and mining industries find new sources of fossil fuels and minerals in the region with very limited success.

Another $16 million was spent to find ways to extract natural gas from methane hydrates in the Mackenzie Delta, a resource the energy industry has showed little interest in because of the technical and economic challenges associated with extracting it.

The recently completed $300 million Inuvik to Tuktoyaktuk Highway, built on rapidly melting permafrost, is another example of this misguided government strategy. According to a study done by the Northwest Territories government, it promises to save the town of Tuktoyaktuk $1.5 million in cost-of-living deliveries, and increase tourism — a good thing if it weren’t for the fact that the town of 900 is sliding into the sea.

Its main purpose, however, was to support energy development. It promises to deliver between $347 million and $516 million in increased cash flows from transportation savings over 45 years to resource companies operating in the Arctic.

The problem is that none of this Arctic oil and gas has ever made it to market, with one exception: A few shiploads of oil that Panarctic sent out from Melville Island in the 1980s.

Canada's North Needs Many Things, But Oil and Gas Drilling Isn't One of Them https://t.co/LMTMHR6Cb1 via @ConversationCA & @Kujjua #cdnpoli #arctic #climate

— DeSmog Canada (@DeSmogCanada) January 3, 2018

What does the Mackenzie Valley Pipeline Inquiry Have to Do With This?

Many have blamed the failure of Canada’s Arctic oil and gas strategy on Justice Thomas Berger’s Mackenzie Valley Pipeline inquiry in the mid-1970s.

Berger’s report recommended a 10-year moratorium on pipeline construction in the Mackenzie Valley so that First Nations could resolve their land claims with the federal government. It also led to the creation of a complex permitting process, which has slowed approvals for a more recent pipeline construction project.

The inquiry cast Berger as a symbol of environmental and social justice with his recognition of Indigenous rights.

But the real reason why Arctic oil and gas has never made it south is because of the high cost of piping it over land or shipping it by sea to market.

The Mackenzie Valley Pipeline Project that Justice Berger considered in the 1970s was touted as “the biggest project in free enterprise history..”

Had it been built, it would have been an economic disaster. Bob Blair, the Calgary-based entrepreneur who wanted to build one of two proposed pipelines, suggested as much years later when he wondered why anyone would try again to ship Arctic oil and gas south.

The second Mackenzie Valley pipeline would have fared even worse. First proposed in 2004, the pipeline would have required gas prices to be in the range of $6 to $8 to break even.

That looked good in the years that followed when gas prices temporarily soared to nearly $15 in June 2008. Since then, however, the price has sat largely in the range of $2 to $6. The cost of the $20 billion pipeline would now need gas prices to triple from current rates to recoup its cost. That’s why Imperial Oil, its main proponent, received permission to delay the project until 2022 at the earliest.

In the meantime, Canadian governments have seemed oblivious to the fact that human-caused climate change — largely due to the burning of fossil fuels — is ending the Arctic as we know it. Since the 1970s, air temperatures in the Arctic have risen by as much as 5℃ and sea ice area has declined by about 12 per cent per decade.

The ripple effect

A warmer and shorter ice season means some polar bears have less time to hunt seals, and mosquitoes and flies have more time to take their toll on caribou, whose populations are at a historic low.

As sea levels continue to rise, powerful storm surges are causing massive saltwater intrusions, imperilling the freshwater lakes, wetlands and deltas that support tens of millions of nesting birds.

Soon low-lying coastal Inuit communities such as Tuktoyaktuk, sitting on rapidly thawing permafrost, will have to be relocated, like residents of the Alaskan community of Shishmaref have voted to do.

We are already seeing the rippling effects of some of these changes throughout the Arctic ecosystem.

Capelin, not Arctic cod, is now the dominant prey fish in Hudson Bay. Killer whales, once largely absent from the Arctic, are beginning to prey on narwhal and beluga, important food sources for the Inuit. Polar bears at the southern end of their range are getting thinner and producing fewer cubs. Trees and shrubs are overtaking tundra landscapes. Sub-Arctic forests are burning bigger, hotter and more often.

What the future holds for Inuit and First Nations peoples of the north, whose cultures grew out of a close association with this frigid world, is a puzzle.

Those cultures are already in a state of rapid economic reorganization and social readjustment. Most of these people continue to live in overcrowded houses. They have stopped or reduced their consumption of caribou, walrus and other Arctic animals, not because they prefer store-bought beef and pork but because the caribou populations are collapsing, and the receding sea ice makes it difficult for them to hunt marine mammals.

Steered by Northerners

What will the future Arctic look like? That is a wide-open question that can only be answered by debates steered by northerners.

Here’s a list of topics worth discussing. Oil and gas development isn’t one of them.

The Canadian Arctic needs an affordable and efficient air and road network that can bring in tourists and investors.

It needs museums to display artifacts — such as those in the recently discovered Franklin ships — that have been routinely shipped south.

It needs food security that goes beyond subsidizing the transportation of southern foods to the North.

It needs renewable energy to replace diesel, which is prohibitively expensive and polluting.

It needs a better form of post-secondary education that combines traditional knowledge with western scientific knowledge — and a way to convince its best students to stay home, instead of relocating to the south.

It needs a forward-looking ecological conservation plan that will ensure a future for polar bears, caribou, walrus, narwhal, beluga and other Arctic species.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s decision to temporarily ban future oil and gas exploration in the Arctic in December 2016 was a good start to setting a new course for the North.

So was Mary Simon’s report “A New Shared Arctic Leadership Model.” It makes 40 recommendations, many of which have been made several times in the past four decades.

Now it’s time to find new ways of moving forward with a road map to the future that will lead to economic advancement and improvements in the quality of life that Northerners long for and deserve.

The oil and gas industry has has tried and failed for more than 40 years to make a contribution. It doesn’t deserve to be part of this future.

Edward Struzik is a fellow at Queen's Institute for Energy and Environmental Policy in the School of Policy Studies at Queen's University.

Image: Edward Struzik

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Each winter in Canada’s far north, a series of ice roads take form, providing people and supply trucks temporary access to the region’s otherwise isolated towns. But rapid changes to Canada’s north means this spring marks the final melt of one of the north’s famed ice highways, the ‘Road to the Top of the World,’ stretching across 187 kilometres of frozen Mackenzie Delta and Arctic Ocean in the Northwest Territories, linking Inuvik to Tuktoyaktuk.

“It’s taking longer for everything to freeze up, and the ice isn’t as thick,” Wally Schumann, the minister of infrastructure for the Northwest Territories, told the New York Times in April. The Northwest Territories is warming at four to five times the global rate.

Under construction right now is a new permanent $300-million all-weather road — but its long-term stability is also challenged by the unpredictable, warming landscape says Phil Marsh, professor and Canada Research Chair in Cold Regions Water Science at Wilfred Laurier University.

“This area is continuous permafrost with massive amounts of ground ice,” Marsh explained.

In the spring, melting water can carve sizeable channels through the ground ice, “which can rapidly drain a lake in less than twenty four hours.”

That’s not great for highways. Canadians might recall the incredible story of a small upland lake “falling off a cliff” in the Northwest Territories, causing a slow hillside collapse and the displacement of millions of cubic metres of mud and debris.

Once a “Road to Resources,” New Highway Highlights Struggling North

Ice roads have long played a key role in connecting remote northern communities, bringing workers from small towns to remote jobs at mines, including the north’s dramatic diamond mines.

Northwest Territories regional director and former Inuvik Mayor Peter Clarkson estimates that the ice road to Tuktoyaktuk has been in formal operation since 1974.

During that time, it has provided a seasonal yet vital link for ‘Tuk,’ temporarily alleviating astronomical grocery and supply prices and providing social and cultural connection between the two communities.

The ice road has also simplified the transport of the diesel fuel needed to power the hamlet’s generators, which is otherwise shipped via barge or flown in by plane during the remainder of the year.

Canada’s north is already experiencing effects of climate change that are outpacing those in the rest of the country.

Yet despite general concerns about the reliability of winter ice roads in the Northwest Territories climate adaptation strategy, instability of the Inuvik-Tuk ice road itself was not the sole driver in building the permanent Inuvik-Tuk Highway. Indeed, data on the ice road from 1983-2015 itself reveal that the road has remained open a fairly steady average of just over four months each winter.

“The ice road season has not really shrank dramatically,” explained Clarkson. “You don’t need forty below to make good ice. Minus fifteen and no snow will do it.”

Ironically, much of the original economic case for the all-weather road was placed on the potential for supporting additional fossil fuel development along the Mackenzie Delta and Beaufort Sea.

Former Prime Minister Stephen Harper promised the new permanent highway would become Canada’s “road to resources.”

But a late 2016 arctic drilling ban by both U.S. and Canadian governments has put a halt to those prospects. While the new U.S. administration may attempt to reverse course on that front, it’s uncertain if the highway will deliver the economic salvation once promised.

Recently the Inuvialuit Regional Corporation applied for federal funding to explore gas deposits along the new highway corridor. Oil and gas plays in the Northwest Territories, far from any pipelines or roads, have often been considered uneconomic. The new highway could change that.

While Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has expressed to northerners that he wants to see other doors of economic opportunity opening, it remains to be seen what form those opportunities will take.

For the moment, Tuktoyaktuk Mayor Dennis Nasogaluak feels the bulk of the anticipated economic boom from the opening of the highway has now been stifled.

“It’s really difficult for us and we’re really stumped about what we’re going to do,” he told DeSmog Canada.

“Tourism might be two or three months a year, but it’s nothing to replace industry.”

“We are really struggling with the long-term outlook for our community. A few people are able to up and leave and follow the jobs, but the majority of us here can’t do that.”

The Inuvi-Tuktoyaktuk ice road, meandering through Arctic tundra. Photo: Matt Jacques

Highway Construction in Husky Watershed Causes Concern for Inuvialuit

The nature of the new all-weather highway and its interaction with the local ecosystem have also raised some questions.

Biologist Danny Swainson was working as Fisheries Resource Specialist for the Fisheries Joint Management Committee during the first years of construction on the highway, beginning in 2014.

“There was very little done to establish a baseline on the fisheries in the region before construction began” Swainson told DeSmog Canada.

“Going in, we knew almost nothing about how the entire system operates and how important these streams may be for certain species,” he said. “That’s the responsibility of the developer, and the work that was done wasn’t up to par.”

Over the course of construction, Swainson said he’s noticed sediment, erosion and fish passage issues.

“All of this is happening in the Husky Lakes watershed, which is an invaluable resource for the Inuvialuit,” he said.

“Roads and fisheries in general don’t get along very well, so the importance of a strong local management plan for Husky Lakes and the surrounding streams is necessary. That’s going to be crucial to protecting that fishery going forward.”

There are also concerns that the road itself may play a feedback role in accelerating the warming and melting of the surrounding landscape.

“One of the unknowns would be the dust from the road, especially in the winter time. If it’s a lot, it would affect the timing of snowmelt, and the underlying permafrost,” Marsh said.

Famous Canadian Ice Road Melts for the Last Time https://t.co/Uxl8olLFzv #cdnpoli #arctic #icemelt #climatechange pic.twitter.com/9i5lfQb6uw

— DeSmog Canada (@DeSmogCanada) May 17, 2017

Tuktoyaktuk Struggles to Bring About Renewable Energy Transition

For many communities in the north, making a transition to renewable energy generation has been a logical part of adapting to this changing environment.

However in Tuktoyaktuk, attempts to significantly reduce their reliance on diesel have fallen short so far.

Nasogaluak explained, “the community had a proposal for a wind farm a few years back, but they couldn’t get a good purchasing agreement with the territorial power corporation to put power back into the grid. So that was lost.”

But dealing with adversity and adapting has been a long-standing part of the community’s history.

“As the river silted up going back five, six seven hundred years ago, the beluga no longer went as far up the river, so our community gradually moved north to where we are now” Nasogaluak said.

“Our people have experienced so much change, we are very adaptable. But when it comes to infrastructure it’s hard for us to deal with because we have limited capacity to help our people move.”

“We’ve come to a modern way of living now and it costs a lot more money to move a house from one place to another. We’re running into those climate issues where we have to adapt and move. If we’re building new infrastructure, it’s being built further inland now.”

The potential impacts and opportunities presented by the new all-weather highway are challenging to predict when the very foundation of communities like Inuvik and Tuktoyaktuk are threatened by melting permafrost and the effects of climate change, which disproportionately impact the north.

“We’re adapting by pulling our infrastructure inland, but we need to mitigate some areas that we have to protect. We have a cemetery that we need to ensure doesn’t erode any further into the Beaufort” said Nasogaluak.

Tuktoyaktuk cemetery. Photo: Matt Jacques

As the Inuvik-Tuk ice road melts for the final time, the importance of ongoing research to inform future infrastructure investment and community decision-making could not be more clear.

“Even if society stabilizes the climate at 1.5 or 2 degrees Celsius in the coming decades, the Inuvik area will be much warmer than this,” Marsh said.

“At 4 to 6 degrees Celsius or more, it will be thousands of years before conditions return to current or pre-industrial levels.”

“As a result, the permafrost will continue to thaw and the massive buried ice continue to melt,” Marsh said. “This will have serious, but poorly understood, consequences for at least a few hundred years.”

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While the Keystone XL, Northern Gateway, Trans Mountain and Energy East pipelines remain stalled in political upheaval, environmental opposition and regulatory processing, the government of Alberta could start moving landlocked oil to tidal waters via the Arctic as early as 2015, according to a technical report recently released by the Alberta government. 

The report, authored by Canatec Associates International Ltd., an Arctic petroleum consultation firm, considers three scenarios for exporting oilsands product, all of which were deemed technically feasible. An early, exploratory shipment of oil to the Arctic could be on the move as early as next year, the report states.

The Arctic Gateway Pipeline, previously considered logistically unfeasible, has been eyed with increasing interest recently, as a warming climate begins to open up the north to new development and previously inaccessible shipment routes.

The report notes the new export route stands to benefit from a combination of a changing northern climate, hunger for resource development in Yellowknife and the Northwest Territories, and the growing desperation to move Alberta oil to Asian markets.

The Financial Post reports “an aggressive push from the federal government to reduce environmental oversight in the territory” is part of the “combination of winning conditions” adding to the proposal’s viability.

The report states Alberta “could take a leadership role within Canadian confederation, on the future of the Arctic.”

“Alberta will automatically be a major player in this industry if it has already established an Arctic Energy Gateway.”

The Canatec report notes the Arctic “lacks the equipment, personnel and logistical capacity to effectively respond to oil spills,” adding, “no oil spill response organizations are certified to work in the Arctic.”

Proposed route to the Arctic. Image from Canatec.

The pipeline is projected to transport up to 100,000 barrels of diluted bitumen a day. The Keystone XL pipeline would carry up to 700,000 barrles of oil per day from Canada to the Gulf Coast and the federally-approved Enbridge Northern Gateway pipeline would have a daily capacity of 525,000 barrels of oil.

Alberta Energy spokesperson Ryan Cromb told Fort McMurray Today the report was commissioned to survey oil-export options, and not to identify an alternative to existing pipelines.

“This report was commissioned as part of our larger look at market access in all directions – east, west, north and south,” he said. “Alberta Energy is continuing to review the report and will use it to help better inform us and more fully understand market options.”

Mike Hudema from Greenpeace Canada told Fort McMurray Today it is “absolutely ridiculous” Alberta is considering an Arctic route for oil export.

“Not only should we not be expanding the oilsands at a point where we are blowing past so many environmental thresholds, but now we want to endanger one of the last remaining untouched ecosystems?” he said.

Keith Stewart, energy and climate campaigner for Greenpeace, echoed these concerns: “The melting of the arctic should be setting off alarms saying we should start moving away from fossil fuels,” he said. “Instead, we are using it as an opportunity to make things worse.”

New economic attention has been paid to Arctic shipping routes since ice levels dropped to record lows in the summer of 2012. Unprecedented ice retreat in August 2012 opened up Parry Channel in the Northwest Passage, signaling a new life to the historic shipping route that, until then, was thought too dangerous to be economic.

Ice in the Perry Channel July 17, 2012. Image by NASA.

Ice retreat in Perry Channel on August 3, 2012. Image by NASA.

In 2013 a container ship used the Northwest Passage to deliver cargo to the port in Rotterdam.

Canatec currently lists the Northwest Passage as “technically feasible to open.”

Image Credit: Tuktoyaktuk by pony_coach via Flickr.

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With Enbridge’s Northern Gateway Pipeline project still in the assessment phase and the Keystone XL pipeline proposal awaiting approval from down south, the government of Alberta is considering the possibility of sending its tar sands bitumen north via a pipeline through the Northwest Territories.

With a view to exporting the estimated $30 billion worth of oil left in the ground every year due to the transportation bottleneck, Alberta has hired Calgary consulting firm Canatec Associates International to determine the feasibility of transporting tar sands crude to the Arctic before sending it on tankers to Asian and European markets. The province has already invested $50,000 in the process.

This northern pipeline would move oil through the Mackenzie River Valley to Tuktoyaktuk, a town off the coast of the Northwest Territories.

A pipeline north through the Arctic Sea could prove more dangerous than any of the pipeline projects currently proposed to travel across Canada or down to the American Gulf coast. Shallow waters off the Alaskan coast would pose significant challenges, requiring either dredging of the waters or extending the pipeline offshore so tankers could load up.

With no deepwater port in the Arctic and little in the way of spill response infrastructure, an accident would be even more devastating to the fragile northern ecosystem.

The history of industrial disasters in the region—most infamous among them the 1989 Exxon Valdez spill—paints a clear picture of what’s at stake.

Royal Dutch Shell demonstrated earlier this year the risks associated with drilling in the Arctic when its Kulluk rig, working out in the Beaufort Sea, came loose from its escort tugboat on route to Seattle and ran aground on Sitkalidak Island in the Gulf of Alaska. The company also suffered embarrassment when a routine spill response test failed after an underwater spill containment dome was inexplicably 'crushed like a beer can' during the exercise.  

The US Environmental Protection Agency also deemed that both the Kulluk and a second drill ship, the Noble Discoverer, were in violation of air pollutant permits during the 2012 summer drilling season. Both vessels allowed the release of excess nitrogen oxides into the air.

After conducting an emergency review of Shell’s operations, the US Interior Department demanded the company demonstrate to both government and an independent third party that repairs had been made and adequate safety measures were in place. A spokesperson for Shell indicated the company would work to renegotiate the terms of its permits rather than work to meet the standards the EPA has set for it.

The Interior Department also placed blame on government agencies such as the Coast Guard for failing to anticipate problems, an assessment that has left some to question Canada's preparedness as the Alberta government looks northward.

At the moment, no rigorous spill-response legislation is in place to protect the Arctic waters. However, in February, Greenpeace obtained a leaked copy of the Arctic Council’s long-awaited spill response plan, set to be adopted at the Arctic nations meeting this month.

Ben Ayliffe, head of the Arctic Oil campaign for Greenpeace International, says the document requires so little of the countries who share the Arctic waters—Denmark, Greenland, the Faroe Islands, Iceland, Norway, Russia, Sweden, the United States and Canada—as to be all but meaningless in terms of policy.

“No oil company has ever proven it can clean up an oil spill in ice. The agreement offers nothing whatsoever in terms of identifying how a company would stop and clean up a Deepwater Horizon-style disaster,” Ayliffe said in a press release. The document also failed to address how oil companies would be liable for damages should an oil spill occur. According to Ayliffe "serious questions" remain concerning how much input oil companies had in drafting the agreement.

The oil industry, long criticized for its disproportionate contribution to climate change, is now ironically reaping the benefits of new arctic drilling and oil transport opportunities emerging in the wake of unprecedented ice melt. With global temperatures steadily rising, routes in the far north that were once frozen year-round will soon be open during peak season.

A study by climate scientists at UCLA titled “New Trans-Arctic shipping routes navigable by mid-century” suggests rapid sea ice melt is causing major changes to Arctic geography. The two scientists combined multiple climate projection models and climate change scenarios and compared them to shipping routes.

The results predict new routes through the Northwest Passage, the Northern Sea Route and straight across the North Pole will be available between 2040 and 2049.

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