We had a discussion at work yesterday about what it would mean if sea levels rise, possibly up to 20 feet, in our children’s lifetime if not ours. What would Boston look like, or the southern Atlantic and Gulf coasts? One person insinuated that a lot of rich people in our area would be in trouble - think Cape Cod, Back Bay - to which my boss responded, “No, those people have cars. They’re fine.” So what will this do to other parts of the world where people are often way more crowded along the coasts than we are?

A day after Christmas, the Anchorage Daily news ran an article about flooding and erosion in small Alaska Native villages on the west coast of Alaska with names no one else except Alaskans are familiar with….Shismaref, Kivalina, and Newtok. It is a story Alaska Natives are quite familiar with. With the sea ice thinner, arriving later, and leaving earlier in the Bering Sea, Bering Strait, and Chukchi Sea, coastal communities are experiencing more intensified storms with larger waves then they have ever experienced, and the loss of permafrost which kept river banks from eroding too quickly. Permafrost is a layer of ground that is frozen year around, or at least it used to be year-around.

The waves from these seas are larger because there is no sea ice to diminish their intensity, slamming against the west and northern shores of Alaska, causing severe storm driven coastal erosion. It has become so serious that several coastal villages are now actively trying to figure out where to move entire communities.