57The U.S. military followed up by strengthening its
overall Arctic strategy, which now includes plans
for multiple polar vessel ports in the region, and a
possible home base in Nome.
As climate change redraws the Arctic map,
regional cooperation over fish stocks, shipping
routes, research programs, and resource extrac-
tion will be vital to protect what was once opti-
mistically dubbed the Pole of Peace by the last So-
viet President, Mikhail Gorbachev. The immediate
challenge: seven of the eight nations that make up
the Arctic Council, established in 1996 to facilitate
cooperation and collaboration in Arctic affairs, put
a stop to all joint activities to protest the invasion
of Ukraine by the eighth member.
Climate scientists tracking the global impacts
of polar-ice melt like to say that what happens in
the Arctic doesn’t stay in the Arctic. The inverse,
it seems, is also true.DIANA HAECKER REMEMBERS the exact day that
climate change became real to her. Haecker, who
in addition to owning Mushing Magazine is the
editor of the Nome Nugget, Alaska’s oldest con-
tinuously published newspaper, leafed through
a book of bound archives at the Nugget offices in
September. She paused at a cover photo taken on
Feb. 20, 2018, from the shore of Little Diomede Is-
land, the U.S.’s westernmost outpost in the Bering
Strait. You could see nothing but water and waves
all the way to the horizon. “When I saw this photo,
I had to catch my breath because that is so scary,”
says Haecker. All of this should be a blanket of ice,
she recalls thinking. “That is when I realized we
were probably past the tipping point.” A headline in
that week’s edition was equally frightening: “Nome
at 51°F, Record High Temperatures Melt Winter
Away.” The ice didn’t return that year.
Sea ice doesn’t just protect Arctic coasts from
savage winter storms. It’s also an essential ele-
ment of the region’s—and the world’s—food web.
Algae growing underneath feeds the fish larvae and
tiny crustaceans that are the food source for most
ocean inhabitants, and marine mammals like seals
and polar bears need the ice floes to hunt and give
birth. Furthermore, Alaska’s coastal Indigenous
populations rely on sea ice for subsistence hunt-
ing. One seal can keep a family in meat for a year.
In communities around Nome—where groceries
are flown in at great expense; a watermelon can
cost $50 and a frozen Thanksgiving turkey up to
$60—hunting is not a pastime, it’s a lifeline. “The
ocean is our grocery store,” says Austin Ahmasuk,
a marine advocate at Kawerak, a regional nonprofit
that serves the Alaska Native residents of the Ber-
ing Strait region. “Subsistence foods—animals and
fish, birds, resources from the land and water—
collectively comprise a majority of a person’s diet
in a [Native Alaskan] village.”
The latest report from the U.N. Intergovern-
mental Panel on Climate Change noted that “in-
creasing weather and climate extreme events have
exposed... people to acute food insecurity and
reduced water security, with the largest impacts
observed in many locations and/or communities
in... the Arctic, especially for Indigenous Peoples.”
Already communities are starting to adapt. Some
have started hunting moose, a once foreign spe-
cies that is now moving northward into the tun-
dra as new vegetation takes root in the thawing
permafrost. On the coast, pollock is starting to re-
place the cold-loving salmon and arctic char that
used to dominate the northern Bering Sea. “As we
continue to warm, we’ve got to come up with new‘The
ocean
is our
grocery
store.’
—AUSTIN AHMASUK,
A MARINE
ADVOCATE AT
KAWERAK,
A REGIONAL
NONPROFIT