There’s a line in the 2018 Arctic Report Card that I keep coming back to.
Released this week by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, it notes with alarm the record low extent for virtually the entire ice season in the Bering Sea.
The line brings me back to a sunny midsummer morning in Teller, Alaska.
I’m standing with Mayor Blanche Obanoke-Garnie, just above Teller’s shoreline. I had traveled 4,000 miles north as a National Geographic explorer to listen and learn how Americans were responding to the dynamic and dangerous shifts along our coastlines as sea levels rise.
As we looked out into sea’s wide expanse, Blanche explained that ice, and the protection it brings, had always been a given for Teller.
Teller sits on the most north-western edge of the North American continent. A remote town of around 230 Iñupiat residents, the community is built on a gravel spit that juts out into the Bering Strait. Sea ice is critical to the survival of the village, which is surrounded on three sides by water.
In normal years, ice begins to form around coastlines of the Bering Sea in early fall. It serves as an extension of the shoreline, providing a thick buffer to protect coastal villages like Teller from strong seasonal storms.
But climate change has introduced a new, dangerous normal.
Alaska is warming at twice the rate of the global average. And as air and sea temperatures warm at record-breaking speeds, sea ice forms much more thinly and much later into the year. According to the Arctic Report Card, during the winter of 2017 and 2018 when ice historically accumulates, the Bering Sea lost a section of ice the size of Idaho.
With no ice, Teller has no natural defense from increasingly intense storm surges that annually flood the town’s streets and sewage system. The US Army Corps of Engineers has identified Teller as one of the most imminently threatened villages in Alaska from this flooding. It is one of 12 communities currently exploring relocation away from the coastline further inland to higher, drier ground.
For Blanche, the loss of sea ice is more than a scientific indicator of persistent Arctic warming. It represents the daily danger of losing the places, histories and traditions that define Teller as a centuries-strong Native community.
But while the fate of Teller is intimately connected to the fate of sea ice, it is not the only community facing the consequences of the Arctic’s unprecedented melt. The extent of sea ice in the Arctic affects the safety of Americans in Alabama and Arizona just as much as it does in Alaska.
Sea ice in the polar regions helps to moderate global climate by reflecting solar radiation back into space. But as more ice is lost each season, more heat is absorbed by the ocean, compromising the Arctic’s ability to keep earth cool. And with more global warming, come more extreme storms across our shared world.
Today, 96% of Americans live in counties that have been hit by major weather disasters in the last five years alone.
No matter what corner of this country you call home, whether it be the coast, the mountains, the Great Lakes or the Great Plains, climate change is already causing billions of dollars in damages and irreplaceable cultural loss.
The severe warming and 95% loss of the Arctic’s oldest ice documented in the Arctic Report Card is not only pushing the region into uncharted territory. It is pushing our entire world into the most “unprecedented transition in human history”. Arctic ice loss is changing our shared planet at an extraordinary and life-threatening rate.
For me, the Bering Sea ice loss noted in the Arctic Report Card represents the danger of losing the places, histories and traditions that define communities across America – not just in Alaska.
In October, the world’s leading scientists warned that we have just 12 years to contain a climate change catastrophe in a landmark UN report. We cannot afford to wait to act ambitiously on climate change. The Arctic is already facing a climate change catastrophe in 2018.
And what happens in the Arctic, doesn’t stay in the Arctic. It affects us all.
Victoria Herrmann is the managing director the Arctic Institute, a Gates scholar at Cambridge University, and a National Geographic explorer