53The city of Nome, on Alaska’s
Bering Sea coast, has long been the
home of adventurers, chancers, and
the fiercely independent who would
rather live off the land than do their
shopping at Walmart.Originally a Native Inupiat settlement that was
taken over by miners in the 1899 gold rush, it is
perhaps best known as the end point of the cel-
ebrated Iditarod dogsled race, which is run every
March in commemoration of an epic effort to de-
liver essential medical supplies during a 1925
diphtheria outbreak when bad weather prevented
airplane access. To this day there are no roads con-
necting the settlement to the rest of the U.S., or to
the rest of Alaska, for that matter. The options are
dogsled, snowmobile, sea, or air.
Opting for the latter, I landed in Nome
(pop. 3,699) in late September. As I waited for my
suitcase, I struck up a conversation with a man
who called himself Yukon John. The unusually
long summer season had been a good one for the
gold miner, he said. To prove it, he pressed a small
heavy-for-its-size plastic jar into my hands. It was
full of granulated gold, panned from the mineral-
rich sandbanks just offshore. Then he added a trio
of thumb-size nuggets. That was just a tiny sam-
ple of his latest haul, he told me. Last spring the
ice that usually locks the coast in an impenetrable
shield broke up early, and if the previous year was
anything to go by, it wouldn’t re-form until late
fall. That gave Yukon John plenty of time to dredge
for gold at his Bering Sea claim. The miner said
he doesn’t spend much time thinking about global
warming, but if climate change means more oppor-
tunities for hitting the sandbanks, well, “Bring it
on. The way I see it, we have to take advantage of
whatever comes our way.”
Yukon John’s fortune could be Nome’s down-
fall. Without the protective sea-ice shield, winter
storms batter houses and buildings along ocean-
side Front Street, blasting past the rock barriers
and tearing up the pavement. Permafrost, the
layer of frozen soil and ice that serves as the Arctic
region’s bedrock, is starting to thaw because of ris-
ing temperatures, and the entire town is buckling
in a slow- motion earthquake. Parts of the Nome
airport runway have cratered, and houses slump
at odd angles, their foundations propped up by ce-
ment blocks and wooden 4-by-4s stacked in Jenga
formation. The loss of thick sea ice means the In-
digenous groups that make up half the town’s pop-
ulation, and most of the surrounding communi-
ties, can no longer reliably hunt, harvest, or fish the
foods that sustain them year-round. Meanwhile,◁ THE LOSS OF
SEA ICE DUE TO
CLIMATE CHANGE
COULD SOON TURN
THE PORT OF NOME
INTO AN ESSENTIAL
TRANSPORT HUB