[LINK] National Geographic on the melting ice cellars of the Arctic

[rfmcdonald]

Eli Kintisch's National Geographic report notes one minor, but still life-complicating, change in Alaska consequent to global warming.

Building an underground ice cellar to store bowhead whale and other meat in Barrow, Alaska, is no small task. Even in the summertime, permafrost is hard as a rock a foot or so below the surface.

Last year Herman Ahsoak employed a jackhammer and drill to construct a cellar for the whaling crew he has captained for more than a decade. But in the spring, melting snow penetrated the hatch, and the 14-foot deep cellar “filled all the way to the top with water,” Ahsoak says.

Maintaining ice cellars has always been hard work for subsistence hunters in Barrow, the northernmost city in the United States. But warming temperatures have now rendered many of these underground freezers unusable. (Read about how rising temperature are also threatening desert life.)

Increasingly, ice cellars that generations of native Alaskan communities have relied upon for storing food are melting, according to tribal elders and researchers. In addition to the warmer temperatures, coastal erosion and geologic ground disturbances are exacerbating the thaw.

“For many cellars even if [the temperature is] below freezing it’s not cold enough to keep meat safely,” says geophysicist Vladimir Romanovsky of the University of Alaska, Fairbanks.