Climate change destroyed an Alaska village. Its residents are starting over in a new town

Growing up along the banks of the Ninglick River in western Alaska, Ashley Tom would look out of her window after strong storms from the Bering Sea hit her village and notice something unsettling: the riverbank was creeping ever closer.

It was in that home, in the village of Newtok, where Tom's great-grandmother had taught her to sew and crochet on the sofa, skills she used at school when students crafted headdresses, mittens and baby booties using seal or otter fur. It's also where her grandmother taught her the intricate art of grass basket weaving and how to speak the Yupik language.

Today, erosion and melting permafrost have just about destroyed Newtok, eating about 21 metres of land every year. All that's left are some dilapidated and largely abandoned grey homes scraped bare of paint by salt darting in on the winds of storms.

"Living with my great-grandmother was all I could remember from Newtok, and it was one of the first houses to be demolished," said Tom.

In the next few weeks, the last 71 residents will load their possessions onto boats to move to Mertarvik, rejoining 230 residents who began moving away in 2019. They will become one of the first Alaska Native villages to complete a large scale relocation because of climate change.

Newtok village leaders began searching for a new townsite more than two decades ago, ultimately swapping land with the federal government for a place 14 kilometres away on the stable volcanic underpinnings of Nelson Island in the Bering Strait.

But the move has been slow, leaving Newtok a split village. Even after most residents shifted to Mertarvik, the grocery store and school remained in Newtok, leaving some teachers and students separated from their families for the school year.

Calvin Tom, the tribal administrator and Ashley's uncle, called Newtok "not a place to live anymore." Erosion has tilted power poles precariously, and a single good storm this fall will knock out power for good, he said.

For now, the rush is on to get 18 temporary homes that arrived in Mertarvik on a barge set up before winter sets in.

Alaska is warming two to three times faster than the global average. Some villages dotting the usually frigid North Slope, Alaska's prodigious oil field, had their warmest temperatures on record in August, prompting some of Ashley Tom's friends living there to don bikinis and head to Arctic Ocean beaches.

It's the same story across the Arctic, with permafrost degradation damaging roads, railroad tracks, pipes and buildings for 4 million people across the top of the world, according to the Washington, D.C.-based Arctic Institute. In the Russian Arctic, Indigenous people are being moved to cities instead of having their eroding villages relocated and across Scandinavia, reindeer herders are finding the land constantly shifting and new bodies of water appearing, the institute said.

About 85 per cent of Alaska's land area lies atop permafrost, so named because it's supposed to be permanently frozen ground. It holds a lot of water, and when it thaws or when warmer coastal water hits it, its melting causes further erosion. Another issue with warming: less sea ice to act as natural barriers that protect coastal communities from the dangerous waves of ocean storms.

The Yupik have a word for the catastrophic threats of erosion, flooding and thawing permafrost: "usteq," which means "surface caves in." The changes are usually slow — until all of a sudden they aren't, as when a riverbank sloughs off or a huge hole opens up, said Rick Thoman, a climate specialist with the International Arctic Research Center at the University of Alaska Fairbanks.

There are 114 Alaska Native communities that face some degree of infrastructure damage from erosion, flooding or permafrost melt, according to a report in January from the Alaska Native Health Tribal Consortium. Six of them — Kivalina, Koyukuk, Newtok, Shaktoolik, Shishmaref and Unalakleet — were deemed imminently threatened in a Government Accountability Office report more than two decades ago.