Robert “Bobby” Amarok could see the storm building out his kitchen window.   Through paneless glass, he looked straight out onto Golovnin Lagoon where his daughter Lisa used to swim as a girl.  That was way before the village’s shoreline started slipping to slow and steady erosion.

But after the typhoon, there was nothing gradual about the massive waves that slammed into the beach.  Chomped away were giant clumps of seaside sod exposing a dramatic underlayer of frozen soil.  For Amarok, his daughter, and many others in Golovin, it was the first time any had laid eyes on so much permafrost.  When the rain finally stopped, the now-naked icy ground was literally sweating in the exposed elements.

The tropical storm system, Merbok, that moved into Western Alaska two weekends ago met an Arctic ecosystem that climate scientists say is very different from just a few decades back.  Air and ocean temperatures, intimately synchronized with the formation of annual sea ice, have become warmer and more disruptive compared to a similar squall that pounded the region almost fifty years prior.

Amarok remembers the Bering Sea Storm of 1974 like it was yesterday.  “A big one,” he said.  “But there was sea ice that time.”  Then as now, he looked out his window in disbelief at floodwaters surrounding his home less than a mile from shore.  “The water had never run up that high before,” Amarok, 74, said.  In his mind, that’s when Golovin’s seasonal surges started to change, if not intensify.  “Almost every year, now, there’s water that comes up real high.”

Chunks of seaside sod knocked down from ex-Typhoon Merbok expose a dramatic underlayer of permafrost on the beach of Golovin, Alaska.  Jenni Monet, The Nome Nugget

But coastal communities like Golovin, a traditional Iñupiat village, have largely struggled to find relief.  For all the hundreds of millions of dollars in government spending devoted to helping address the effects of a warming planet, the Government Accounting Office has found few, if any, success stories.   And it’s not a new problem.  Since 2009, when auditors first called attention to at least  31 imminently threatened villages in Alaska, they have since repeatedly urged Congress to pass policies to help streamline the process, making it easier to deliver solutions to the most environmentally vulnerable.  So far, lawmakers have been slow to act.

The GAO’s most recent call for climate response reform came just as Golovin was starting to pick up the pieces left in Merbok’s path.  On Monday, September 19, a new watchdog report was released, calling attention to the fiscal risks facing the federal government in reacting to extreme weather events as opposed to planning and preparing for them.  “Managing climate change is on [the GAO’s High Risk List] in part because of concerns about the increasing costs of disaster response and recovery efforts,” the report said.  

Read the Article

Indigenously in collaboration with The Nome Nugget broke down some numbers and spoke with Alaska politicians about climate concerns that have lingered long after the storm: In the fastest-warming place on the planet, how seriously should we accept extreme weather as our new normal? And how best should we be preparing for it?

Long Read

Even Before Merbok, Native Villages Were in Harm's Way

A trail of coastal flooding reveals gaps in government support to address climate threats

Jenni Monet for The Nome Nugget 

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