Climate Change

The team’s job is to come up with recommendations for how Alaska should deal with climate change.

Village leaders think they might have found a solution for the eroding village of Newtok’s relocation problem. And it comes from an unexpected place: an Anchorage military base. 

Alaska is likely to stay warm this month, while much of the Lower 48 experiences a cold snap. The culprit is a feature of the jet stream called a Rossby wave.

Dennis Davis started using a drone about three years ago to document the changes in Shishmaref. “I feel that if I don’t do this, we’re basically out of sight, out of mind,” he says.

Ice in the Chukchi Sea is at a record low for this time of year, by a wide margin.

Newtok’s 400 people have been trying to relocate for years. And for years, the main obstacle has been the same: money. Now, they’re almost out of time. And residents and officials say, at this point, moving Newtok may take an act of Congress.

When the river takes the first houses, the village could start to scatter. And Newtok’s blend of the modern and traditional could erode away with the land.

The power generated by the solar panels go directly to the building. They’ll provide around 3 to 7 percent of the building’s power in the summer.

“People recall a time in the past when there was widespread famine,” said Joseph Manning, a professor at Yale University. But the ancient civilization didn’t know it was caused by eruptions halfway around the world.

JPSS-1 satellite features instruments that can see through clouds, determine sea surface temperatures, detect rising river levels, and spot small fires before they become big ones. It can also observe the Arctic Ocean and Alaska’s North Slope, something that geostationary weather satellites cannot do.