With homes dilapidating, shores eroding and staircases falling off the houses, Point Lay residents are living through some of the most severe consequences of the warming climate in Alaska.
Abnormally warm winters in 2018 and 2019, in which the ground did not freeze solid enough to support heavy equipment, delayed completion of this project.
In Chefornak, a family was forced to evacuate their home because a sinkhole caused by thawing permafrost formed underneath it. That family had to move into a building intended to be a quarantine facility.
Staircases are separating from building and utility poles leaning.
The ground under the new road is developing a sink hole and affecting the foundation of the adjacent house.
Mayor Clyde Ramoth says frozen pipes are a chronic problem due to issues with the initial installation of the above-ground water system. The warming climate isn’t making things any easier.
The incident appears similar to an oil and gas release in 2017 blamed on thawing permafrost and hot production fluids.
Thinner sea ice and melting permafrost. Is it related to changes in the Earth's axis?
Permafrost thaw is affecting houses, roads, and ice cellars.
New research shows that permafrost soils hold massive quantities of mercury — nearly twice as much as is held in all other soils in the world, plus the mercury in the oceans and the atmosphere —
Leaning utility poles in south Anchorage
Just what exactly is permafrost? And what is happening now that it's warming up? To find out, we enter the Arctic Circle's secret world of ice and frozen history.
Thawing permafrost is warping water and sewer lines. Along the coast and rivers, erosion is threatening the lakes that communities use for drinking water or the lagoons where they dump sewage.
About 10 miles of above-ground water and sewer lines froze in mid-January. ANTHC suspects the lines were damaged when melting permafrost caused building foundations to shift.
The unexpected appearance of sinkholes or groundwater flooding is something to which residents have grown accustomed.
A recent study estimates permafrost coverage on the peninsula has decreased by 60 percent since 1950. Permafrost is usually associated with Northern and Interior Alaska, but it also occurs in isolated pockets in wetlands on the Kenai Peninsula.
As Alaska warms and permafrost thaws, the chemistry of the Yukon River's water is transforming chemically, new research from the U.S. Geological Survey shows.
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