Climate Change

This month, Gov. Mike Dunleavy’s energy security task force released a draft of its statewide energy plan. The draft breaks down strategies to upgrade energy for three major regions in Alaska — rural communities, the coasts, and the Railbelt.

The plan takes a broad approach. There are mentions of fossil fuels — especially natural gas — and renewables like wind, solar and hydropower. It even calls for developing technologies like micronuclear plants.

“It was kind of a large collection of every energy idea anyone’s ever heard for the past 10 years in one document,” said Ben Boetteger, a policy analyst with Cook Inletkeeper. 

But the only specific projects are proposals that have long been criticized by renewable energy advocates.

The document calls for revisiting long-discussed megaprojects like the Susitna Dam and the Alaska Liquid Natural Gas pipeline, also known as the AKLNG project — an 800-mile pipeline that would run from the North Slope to Cook Inlet. 

Activist Arleigh Hitchcock with the Fairbanks Climate Action Coalition said it would be a “carbon bomb,” emitting a massive amount of greenhouse gas that causes climate change.

“We need to move away from natural gas,” Hitchcock said. “It’s still a fossil fuel, and a limited resource. And unreliable.”

The draft plan says that bringing the pipeline to fruition would be good for Railbelt utilities, which rely almost entirely on natural gas from the Cook Inlet. Cook Inlet supplies could run short before the end of the decade. 

But the project also has a $40 billion price tag. And to build it, Alaska would have to sell some gas leases to buyers outside of the state, mostly in Asia. No buyers have come forward yet. 

Critics say the project is not financially feasible, and it’s not clear how much of the hypothetical gas supply from the AKLNG would be sold to Alaskans. 

Hitchcock said the draft plan’s focus on the AKLNG and other natural gas prospects was disappointing.

“It would’ve been nice to see the taskforce come out with some real solutions, some renewable energy solutions, that are the future for Alaska,” they said. “Instead of continuing the same extractive model for the state that isn’t working.”

The draft plan does lay out broad intentions to promote renewable energy projects — things like workforce development and recruitment, new financing options for renewable energy projects, and more money towards the state’s existing renewable energy fund. 

The plan also calls for the adoption of a state clean energy standard. Early on, the taskforce considered a renewable energy standard instead. That would have set enforceable targets and deadlines for utilities to incorporate more sustainable energy like solar and wind power. A clean energy standard — which the task force endorsed — is incentive-based and has looser terms. 

It’s too early to tell if these suggestions will do much to increase the amount of renewable energy in the state. But Boetteger, with Cook Inlet Keeper, said the draft plan’s could motivate lawmakers. 

“I expect this is going to be influential in the legislature, so it will definitely help elevate these issues,” Boetteger said. “But as for solving them, it is definitely not a solution in itself.”

None of the draft plan’s proposals are hard commitments yet. And notably, in nearly 150 pages of proposed renewable energy strategies, the report only mentions climate change once. 

With winter creeping in across Alaska, the climate pattern known as El Niño is back and cycling warmer water through the Pacific Northwest.

National Weather Service climate researcher Brian Brettschneider — back for our Ask a Climatologist segment — says a typical El Niño winter in Alaska is often warmer and characterized by less-than-normal snowfall.

And Brettschneider says this year’s El Niño is expected to be stronger than in the past.

Listen:

The following transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.

Brian Brettschneider: It even may approach what we call a super El Niño, which has only happened a few times in the last 50 years. And those winters typically are pretty poor for snow, actually across much of the state, and particularly in the southern areas where temperatures are generally warmer in the winter than, say, the Interior. In fact, the last time we had a super El Niño develop, in 2014-15, 2015-16, those were some of our worst snow winters, lowest snow winters, on record in much of the state.

Wesley Early: You mentioned that more often than not an El Niño means a warmer winter, but it’s not always a predictor. Why would it not result in a warmer winter?

Brian Brettschneider: Right. Well, it’s really a statistical relationship. And, you know, sometimes these things don’t work out like we think they are. Sometimes the atmosphere doesn’t really, what we call, couple to the ocean. So actually right now, the atmospheric response to these warm temperatures is actually fairly weak. It’s weaker than we typically would expect. And that happens, and it’s happened in several of the more recent events, particularly the La Niñas in the last few years. There was kind of a weak relationship between how the atmosphere responded to these oceanic temperatures.

And right now, again, it’s a fairly weak coupling. And really a big unknown is globally, the oceans are much warmer than normal. And so the fact that the central Pacific is way above normal, actually needs to be put in context with what the areas around it are doing and how those warm ocean waters are also going to affect the flow of the atmosphere. So a lot of unknowns. And it can play out a lot of ways. But again, statistically, historically, it tends to drive southerly flow across the state.

Wesley Early: And how do these weather systems compare to last year, where a lot of the state was really dry and had below normal precipitation, but Anchorage saw a dump of snow — multiple dumps of snow — over a small period of time? Does it look like something similar like that would happen this year?

Brian Brettschneider: Well, precipitation is much more difficult to forecast at the monthly and seasonal timescale than temperature, by a large factor. You know, we have a temperature every day of the year. And temperature, if it’s cool in Anchorage, it’s probably cool in Palmer, it’s probably cool in, you know, King Salmon, whereas precipitation can be very, very spotty. And it only happens maybe one out of every three days. So that’s kind of a good thing to keep in mind.

And in Anchorage, I think in a 12-day period, we had kind of three almost historic snowstorms. But that was very local. If you look regionally, it was a rather unremarkable snow winter in Southcentral. Snow across the state was pretty typical for an average winter. So we do need to be cognizant of the fact that it was extremely local, a lot of kind of unusual things all conspired to come together to give us those three big snowstorms in early to mid-December.

Wesley Early: You mentioned that ocean temperatures being warmer can lead to a warmer winter, you mentioned that El Niños can lead to a warmer winter. There’s also a lot less sea ice along the coast. Does that factor into how cold the winter’s gonna be?

Brian Brettschneider: Right. So you know, a factor in the Climate Prediction Center’s seasonal outlooks is the recently late onset of sea ice along the West Coast and the North Slope. So particularly in the Chukchi Sea, working your way all the way down to the Bering Strait, sea ice sets in much later than normal, and it’s much thinner when it does. So if you get a certain type, like a southerly flow, it can really push that thin ice very far north, even in the middle of winter. And so when you don’t have sea ice over the water, it allows all the warmth from that water to be liberated into the atmosphere and that, of course, will go over the land. So the changing sea ice regime really has a large effect on temperatures, particularly in the early part of the winter.

Wesley Early: We are less than a week out from Halloween. How prepared should kids be to have to wear heavy coats over their costumes? Is it going to be a snowy Halloween?

Brian Brettschneider: Well in Fairbanks, they already have about nine or ten inches of snow on the ground. So if anyone’s listening from the central Interior, I would expect that it’s going to be full-on winter for Halloween, as it typically is. You know, up before 2015, Fairbanks had a perfect record of having snow on the ground every single Halloween, but then they didn’t for I think four out of five years. But now they’re back in the winter groove.

Historically in Anchorage, there’s about a 50-50 chance of having snow on the ground for Halloween. And that’s actually been the case for many decades, although it’s a little less snowy in the last, say, 10 or 15 years. But looking at the current outlook right now, it’s looking like we are probably not going to have a snowy Halloween in Anchorage. So probably no snow suits for the kiddos trick-or-treating.

In October, fall gives way to winter for much of Alaska. But each year, the first frost is arriving later and later. That could be a boon for Alaska farmers.

University of Alaska Fairbanks professor Glenna Gannon says the longer growing season is making some types of crops possible for the first time. 

“We’re successfully able to grow things like artichokes and field-grown tomatoes, peppers and corn here in Fairbanks,” Gannon said. “I don’t think, you know, 30 or even 10 years ago, that would have been successful.”

Gannon runs crop trials at the university’s experiment farm, where nine out of the 10 latest first frosts on record have occurred since 2001. For many places, especially in the Interior, that shift is allowing farmers to keep their crops in the field through mid-September. 

In a state that’s struggled with food security, shifting seasons and hotter temperatures brought on by human-caused climate change could allow Alaska farmers to grow more abundant and diverse produce. But climate change can also bring drought, pests and permafrost thaw. 

And it can make weather more erratic too. Tom Zimmer of Calypso Farm, just outside of Fairbanks, said that’s what he worries about most.

“Yes, frost-free days are increasing,” Zimmer said. “But the instability of the climate is making it probably more difficult to farm.”

Zimmer and his wife have run their small organic farm since 2000. This year, snow and frost lingered late into the spring, which delayed planting. Then a hot, dry summer came on quickly. Some plants thrived. 

“This year, we had excellent green beans, amazing cauliflower,” Zimmer said. “But other crops bolted. It was too hot.” 

Hot summers will become more and more common for many regions across the state, according to climate researcher Nancy Fresco with the university’s International Arctic Research Center. Fresco develops climate models to predict Alaska’s agricultural future. 

“We’re anticipating continued increases in both the length of the growing season — how many frost-free days — but also in the cumulative heat across the growing seasons,” she said. 

Summer heat gives some crops a boost

As the climate warms over the coming decades, the frost-free season will likely get longer by weeks or even months. And summers will continue to get hotter. 

Every plant has its own baseline temperature where it begins to sprout and grow. To mature for harvest, it needs a certain number of days with temperatures above that threshold. Hotter summer days that linger later in the year can increase the number of good growing days to give certain crops a boost. 

Warm-weather species, like tomatoes, corn and peppers, need temperatures of at least around 50 degrees to start growing. To ripen, they need a lot of days that fall above that threshold. So historically, those crops have been hard to grow in Alaska without a greenhouse.

But even cold-tolerant species, like brussels sprouts, have been a challenge because they take a relatively long time to mature. Farmers and gardeners who have tried to grow them in Alaska have risked losing their crops to frost and snow before the harvest.

Theoretically, climate change could help both types of crops. But Fresco said existing climate models also neglect a lot of important factors that shape farming.

“We were really just looking at air temperature, which is of course, a big deal in growing crops,” Fresco said. “But there are some really important factors about what can grow, — that are particular to Alaska, that are challenging in Alaska — that we haven’t yet had a chance to model.”

Permafrost — a layer of soil that remains frozen throughout the year — is one of the most pressing factors in the Interior. It can affect soil temperature and moisture, which can inhibit plant growth regardless of air temperatures. But as it thaws, it will likely destabilize seemingly viable farmland in the sub-Arctic. 

And even as atmospheric conditions become more favorable, farmers will still have to contend with the long hours of sunlight — up to 22 hours for some farms in the Interior. Some crops just can’t tolerate that much light. 

Farmers proceed with caution

Zimmer, from Calypso Farm, says there’s a disadvantage for every advantage that climate change brings. Some of Alaska’s more cold-tolerant crops, like cabbage or broccoli, may actually fare worse as temperatures warm. And many regions in the state are also facing a higher threat of summer drought.

Winters are also becoming more mild overall. While that can be great for certain perennial crops, like fruit trees, Zimmer said it’s brought more aphids and root maggots to his crops.

“In our 20 year experiment, one of the things that’s most noticeable to me is the insect life cycle,” Zimmer said. “One of the beauties of growing in Alaska is a harsh winter that kills a lot of our pests. And that’s starting to go away.”

Climate change will increase the breadth of crop varieties and the amount of land that’s viable for farming in Alaska. In some ways, Zimmer said, that’s a great opportunity to improve food security and access to locally grown food.

“We really want to focus on growing more farmers in Alaska,” he said. “But it’s not like Alaska is warming, everything’s great. We have to proceed slowly, carefully and work with the natural cycles.”

Both Zimmer and Gannon say that planting a diversity of crops is the best way for farmers to prepare for climate change. Though warm weather crops are becoming more possible, they might not be reliable.

“We have the ability to have a much greater breadth of what we grow here,” Gannon said. “But I still want to plant the seed of caution for anyone who’s going out to grow their garden or plant their farm. You know, they’re still in Alaska.”

In the short term, Alaska crab fishers and the communities that depend on them will get a slight reprieve from the disastrous conditions they have endured for the past two years, with harvests for iconic red king crab to open on Sunday.

In the long term, the future for Bering Sea crab and the people who depend on it is clouded by environmental and economic upheaval.

The decision by the Alaska Department of Fish and Game to open harvests of Bristol Bay red king crab after an unprecedented two-year shutdown was a close call, a state biologist told industry members during a meeting on Thursday.

Red king crab are the largest of the commercially harvested crab species, and their meat is prized as a delicacy.

The department’s decision to allow a small harvest, announced on Oct. 6, was based on preseason surveys by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Marine Fisheries Service.

Biologist Mark Stichert said the surveys suggest that the crash that forced two years of closure in the Bristol Bay red king crab fishery, the major Alaska source for that highly prized seafood species, has bottomed out.

“The decline has stopped. But whether or not we’re seeing a rebound in the biomass is hard to say,” Stichert said during the Thursday briefing. He is the Department of Fish and Game’s Kodiak-based groundfish and shellfish fisheries management coordinator.

A red king crab harvest returns, but at much lower levels than the past

The allowable harvest that opened on Sunday, as set by the state, is 2.15 million pounds, a little less than the 2.6 million pounds allocated for harvest in the 2020-21 season, the last time Bristol Bay red king crab was fished. It is considerably lower than in past years; in the 2016-17 season, for example, the total allowable harvest was nearly 8.47 million pounds. Those totals were dwarfed by the annual harvests four decades ago, which peaked in 1980 at nearly 130 million pounds.

The conclusion that crab numbers are now adequate to support a Bristol Bay area harvest hangs on a slender thread — the discovery of 382 adult female crabs in the preseason surveys, 121 more than were pulled up in last year’s surveys, Stichert said. The bulk of the adult females found this year were in a single spot, he said.

“One single 30-minute tow dictated whether you meet the threshold or do not meet the threshold,” he told crab harvesters.

The positive signs for high-value red king crab, as tenuous as they may be, are not yet emerging for Bering Sea snow crab. That marquee Alaska fishery, which in the 1990s supported harvests in the hundreds of millions of pounds, was closed last year for the first time ever, after stocks crashed by about 80%. It will remain closed for the coming year because the stock is continuing to decline, the Alaska Department of Fish and Game announced on Oct. 6.

Climate change looms, threatens future harvests

Scientists are questioning whether full recovery is possible in a warming world for these ailing crab populations that have supported some of the world’s most lucrative fisheries.

Snow crab appear to be particularly vulnerable to climate change, scientists say.

“They stand out because they are a true Arctic species,” said the University of Alaska Fairbanks’ Gordon Kruse, a professor emeritus in the College of Fisheries and Ocean Sciences.

There are already signs that Alaska’s snow crab range is shifting north – as expected by NOAA Fisheries scientists –  which means ocean currents carry the larvae even farther north, he said. But the growth appears to hit a barrier north of the Bering Strait, he said. The Chukchi Sea does have a population of snow crab, “but they’re stunted,” he said. The Chukchi and the Beaufort Sea to its east appear to be unable to support what might be commercial stocks, he said.

Stichert, in his presentation to industry members, described how climate change may be creating some “bottlenecks” for Bristol Bay red king crab in their early life stages.

The females lay their eggs in time for the spring algal bloom that emerges from the underside of the sea ice, he said in his briefing. But reduced ice affects the bloom of plankton on which the larvae depend for the two to three months they are floating around in the water, he said. If they survive that period, the larvae’s fate depends on where they land on the seafloor, he said.

“There are a lot of risks and a lot of opportunities to die for a larval king crab,” he said.

In briefings during the October meeting of the North Pacific Fishery Management Council, biologists described some of the risks to young red crab survival. They include ocean acidification, which inhibits shell growth, and a more robust population of sockeye salmon, which feed on crab larvae when they are at sea.

Another risk comes from the trawl nets used to catch pollock in the same areas used by crab.

The problem is not bycatch in the usual sense, or the unintended harvest of crab caught in nets used to harvest pollock, Kruse said. Those numbers are very low and “do not rise to the level of making a population effect on snow crab or other crab species,” he said.

Rather, the danger is from pollock trawl gear that touches the seafloor, which fishery managers and biologists said happens more frequently than previously believed. That contact can harm crab habitat or injure or kill the crabs themselves, which often are in the vulnerable shell-less molting phase at the same time trawlers are fishing for cod.

“We now know that this gear’s on the bottom a majority of the time,” Kenny Down, a North Pacific Fishery Management Council member, said on Oct. 10, the last day of the October meeting. He noted that the council banned bottom trawling for pollock more than two decades ago, in 2001. The objective of that ban “is currently not being met,” he said. “This gear is in the bottom, it’s in areas that we’ve designated as sensitive, and we’ve prohibited bottom trawling in those areas for a variety of reasons.”

The council is now preparing to consider additional protections for a 4,000-square-nautical mile section of the eastern Bering Sea that has since the mid-1990s been designated as the Bristol Bay Red King Crab Savings Area. Although the council in December rejected a request from crab harvesters for a complete closure of the area to trawling during the first half of the year, it is set to revisit the issue at upcoming meetings.

Another regulatory response to the crab crisis is expected to come in a mandatory review of the quota system that divvies up the Bering Sea crab harvests among fishers and processors. The system of assigned Bering Sea crab quotas, part of a process called “rationalization” that is taking hold in fisheries globally, began in 2005. Rationalization is intended to preserve the safety of fish stocks and people by eliminating the race to harvest that can happen in open-access fisheries. The Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act requires period reviews of quota systems; the crab review has now come due.

The Bering Sea snow crab and Bristol Bay red king crab fisheries are the first rationalized harvests in the nation to suffer such massive collapses, industry representatives said repeatedly.

“One of the main goals of the program is to create economic stability, and we’re seeing anything but that right now,” Jamie Goen told the council. Goen is the executive director of the Alaska Bering Sea Crabbers, the industry group for harvesters.

There are some other crab harvests that are proceeding this year in Alaska’s Bering Sea, but they are relatively small. A harvest of Bering Sea bairdi tanner crab, a species related to snow crab, got the go-ahead from the Alaska Department of Fish and Game, with a total allowable catch of about 2 million pounds: similar to that authorized a year ago. A relatively small harvest of the prized red king crab has been taking place farther to the north, in Norton Sound near the Bering Strait, with a little over 350,000 pounds caught over the summer. But harvests of rare blue king crab continue to be closed, as they have been for the past several years.

Alaska faces competition

While Alaska’s Bering Sea crab populations struggle, stocks and fisheries are flourishing elsewhere.

In eastern Canada, snow crab harvests are high and quotas have been increasing. There, Kruse said, the population has the advantage of an ocean current that sends cold water down from Greenland: the Labrador Current.

“That southern-flowing cold water is very, very favorable to the Arctic population snow crab,” he said. In contrast, the Bering Sea has warm water flowing north from the Pacific Ocean through the Bering Strait, he said.

In the Barents Sea on the Atlantic side of the Arctic, snow crab are recent arrivals, but they are thriving and supporting commercial harvests.

“The thinking is that it’s a natural extension of snow crab in the oceans in the northwest Atlantic, around Canada,” Kruse said. “They’re growing in an area that hasn’t had snow crab in the system, so as invaders, they’re doing quite well.”

Though Alaska is famous for its big crab, those other sources could take away market share, particularly as the Bering Sea enters its second consecutive year of snow crab shutdowns, Kruse said.

“If you turn off the spigot and have no crab to catch, that’s going to be replaced by something else, and probably snow crab from someplace else in the world,” he said.

John Sackton, a Massachusetts-based fishery analyst and consultant, gave a sobering assessment of the Alaska crab industry’s position in global markets.

The interrupted harvests make it difficult for buyers who previously bought and advertised the Alaska product, he said.

“It definitely changes the behavior of people who would normally be the consumers of Alaska crab,” he said. And once consumers have switched to other sources of crab, Canada or Norway, for example, they will not easily switch back to Alaska products. If and when Alaska stocks recover and harvests return to normal levels, it will take a long time to regain those markets, he said.

The allowable bairdi tanner crab harvest is a consolation, as bairdi is an excellent product that many chefs and knowledgeable consumers prefer to snow crab, he said. But there is a downside even to the bairdi harvest, he said. “The problem is bairdi has been that over the last 10 years or so, the harvests have been very erratic. Because it’s been erratic like that, it’s been very hard to know what might be available.”

Yet more concerning, Sackton said, is that the troubles that have plagued Alaska’s crab stocks have wider reach beyond those shellfish.

“I personally feel that there’s a severe threat with the warmer temperatures in the Bering Sea and fisheries becoming erratic. It’s not just crab,” he said. Other species are affected, too, notably salmon runs outside of Bristol Bay – resulting in bitter fights over salmon crashes along major rivers, allocation decision and at-sea bycatch, he said.

“All of that does make people, to be honest, lose faith in Alaska fisheries,” he said. “I think the Alaska brand is damaged, no question about it.”

This story originally appeared in the Alaska Beacon and is republished here with permission.

Twenty-one species, including birds, a bat and several mussels, have been labeled extinct, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service said Monday.

The species were previously on the national list of threatened and endangered species.

The extinct species include:

• Eight Hawaiian honeycreeper birds
• Bridled white-eye bird of Guam
• Mariana fruit bat of Guam
• San Marcos gambusia, a one-inch long fish from Texas
• Scioto madtom, a small catfish found exclusively in the Big Darby Creek in Ohio
• Bachman’s warbler, a black and yellow songbird found in several Southern states and Cuba
• Eight freshwater mussels: the flat pigtoe, green-blossom pearly mussel, southern acornshell, stirrupshell, tubercled-blossom pearly mussel, turgid-blossom pearly mussel, upland combshell and yellow-blossom pearly mussel

“Our determinations of whether the best available information indicates that a species is extinct included an analysis of the following criteria: detectability of the species, adequacy of survey efforts, and time since last detection,” the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service said.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife first proposed the species be taken off the endangered and threatened list in 2021, as they had not been seen since as early as 1899 and as late as 2004.

There are now 650 species that have gone extinct in the U.S., according to the Center for Biological Diversity, which says factors such as climate change, pollution and invasive species contribute to species loss.

Between 2004 and 2022, climate change effects contributed to 39% of amphibian species moving closer to extinction. About 3 billion birds have been decimated in North America since 1970, Fish and Wildlife said.

Still, 99% of the animals on the endangered and threatened list have not reached extinction. Fifty-four have been taken off the list due to recovery efforts, while 56 have been downgraded from endangered to threatened, Fish and Wildlife said.

“Federal protection came too late to reverse these species’ decline, and it’s a wake-up call on the importance of conserving imperiled species before it’s too late,” Fish and Wildlife Director Martha Williams said. “As we commemorate 50 years of the Endangered Species Act this year, we are reminded of the Act’s purpose to be a safety net that stops the journey toward extinction. The ultimate goal is to recover these species, so they no longer need the Act’s protection.”

The Hawaiian honeycreepers are now extinct due to their forest habitat being cut down for development and agriculture. Mosquitoes, which are not native to Hawaii, also spread avian pox and avian malaria.

Other Hawaiian birds, such as the ‘akikiki, are also on the brink of extinction, with as little as five known pairs in the wild, the Center for Biological Diversity said.

According to the Center for Biological Diversity, the Bachman’s warbler was also lost to habitat destruction and the bridled white-eye and Mariana fruit bat was lost to an invasive brown tree snake.

The Mariana fruit bat was also compromised by agriculture and overconsumption as food. The San Marcos gambusia suffered from water overuse that impacted groundwater supply and spring flow. The scioto madtom was lost to runoff and silt buildup from dams.

Copyright 2023 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

There are already several inches of snow on the ground in Fairbanks, but you won’t find any surrounding Vladimir Romanovsky’s house. Romanovsky, a permafrost expert and professor emeritus at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, keeps the ground shoveled.

“My house, it’s right on the boundary between permafrost and non-permafrost,” he said.

Snow is an insulator; it keeps the ground several degrees warmer than the air. And if there is permafrost below his house, he doesn’t want to risk it thawing, potentially cracking the foundation or creating other structural problems.

“That’s why, just in case, I am shoveling snow around the house to make the ground colder. If there’s some deeper permafrost there, that will prevent it from thawing,” Romanovsky said.

Permafrost is the frozen layer of ground on or just under the Earth’s surface found in polar regions. Romanovsky is part of a team of international scientists who are trying to understand how quickly it’s thawing.

As the climate warms due to human-produced carbon emissions, the Earth’s upper layers of permafrost are at risk of disappearing. The rate it thaws has enormous financial consequences for communities living above permafrost now. Those include Fairbanks, Utqiagvik and dozens of villages in western, northern and Interior Alaska.

The team modeled different scenarios of warming to see the effects on permafrost and published their findings in August in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. In severe warming scenarios they found that more than 75% of Earth’s near-surface permafrost, 10-13 feet below ground, will be gone by the end of the century. Even in more moderate warming scenarios, more than half will disappear.

Based on the air temperature data they recorded, Romanovsky said we’re heading toward that severe warming scenario already.

“We’re kind of on the higher end of the predictions [based on] the real changes in temperature,” he said.

That means three-quarters of the world’s near-surface permafrost is set to vanish by 2100.

This has major implications for cold-climate regions like Alaska, where permafrost covers the majority of the state and thawing is already well underway. One of the biggest impacts is to the built environment.

Buildings, homes, roads, and other infrastructure need stable surfaces to remain sturdy. But when the ground beneath is literally melting, those surfaces start to sink and become unstable. This is already a major problem for rural Alaska communities built on permafrost — and it’s going to get worse.

Ilya Benesch is the Arctic construction manager for the Cold Climate Housing Research Center in Fairbanks, which does building research and answers housing design questions. He said the center is fielding more frequent permafrost-related questions.

“I get calls regularly, it’s one of those steady themes: ‘Hey, I’ve got a sinkhole in my yard. Hey, how do I level my home?’” Benesch said. Lately even: “Do you know anybody that’s a house mover?”

These calls are a sign that climate change is progressing, Benesch said. “I personally think there’s only going to be more of this,” he said.

Benesch, a journeyman carpenter by trade, said there are lots of strategies for building on permafrost, like using continuous steel or wood beams to build a structure that’s rigid enough to handle sinking in places. The constraint is always cost.

“With technology nowadays, we can make it work, but it’s going to be very, very expensive,” said Dr. Joey Yang is a civil engineering professor at UAA.

Yang studies solutions for building on thawing permafrost in places like Bethel, Nome and Utqiagvik. Homes in these areas are often built on adjustable foundations that can be modified as the ground shifts below. Roads and other infrastructure require thermosiphons, big pipes that use cold surface air — or sometimes, air conditioning units — to cool the ground below and keep it from moving.

Yang said as permafrost thaw continues, these solutions will become more crucial — and more costly.

“I think as the climate is going the direction it was predicted, this is just life as usual, we just have to deal with it,” he said.

Scientists say the only thing that could stop permafrost thaw is to significantly curb global carbon emissions to slow warming. But for now, climate change is already here, Yang said, and Alaskans are shouldering the bill.