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As average temperatures rise, two University of Alaska Fairbanks researchers are mapping permafrost’s impact on Alaska.

Vladimir Romanovsky and David McGuire are members of a team working to identify worldwide regions susceptible to thermokarst, the natural process that is the result of what happens when ice-rich permafrost begins to melt.

“The water may run away or stay in place, but because of that, surface of land is subsiding,” Romanovsky said. “This subsidence could be pretty substantial if permafrost is ice rich, and this subsidence of surface develop features — thermokarst features.”

After the thaw, the area affected could erode to form gullies, lakes or any number of other geographic features.

Furthermore, normal erosion could make for even deeper gullies and possible drainage from existing lakes.

For Alaska’s wildlife, Romanovsky said those consequences are a mixed bag.

“For birds who use lakes for living, that development will be good. It may be not so good for caribou, so there will be some losers and winners of this process,” Romanovsky said. “The definite loser is infrastructure.”

The map suggests communities in the Yukon Delta and the North Slope regions are most susceptible to change.

Those regions could see a transition towards an increased amount of wetlands.

McGuire thinks the map can help developers during those transitions.

“If you overlay this, for example, where villages occur or where other infrastructure occurs, you can get a general handle on the amount of infrastructure that’s susceptible to thermokarst disturbance,” McGuire said. “Some of this infrastructure has been put in with the assumption that permafrost will remain relatively stable, and if it does degrade, there will be consequences for maintenance or replacement of infrastructure.”

Romanovsky said consequences to infrastructure add to the threat that thawed permafrost already provides.

“A part of this process will be development or release of carbon dioxide and methane and possibly other gases into the atmosphere and increasing the amount of greenhouse gases,” Romanovsky said.

Romanovsky added that permafrost holds twice as much carbon than what the atmosphere currently has, and says the release process will be slow, estimating decades or more before the full effects are seen.

The researchers’ map claims that twenty percent of the globe’s northern permafrost faces a potential threat from the natural process.

The thermokarst landscape map is available online.

As winter approaches, thousands of Alaskans grapple with rising heating bills.

This year, for the first time in nearly a decade, the state won’t step in to help.

More than 9,000 households will see their heating assistance benefits reduced. Another 1,300 will likely be booted entirely from a now-defunct state program designed to keep low-income Alaskans out of the cold.

In 2008, the state was in a different place. 

“Plenty of money in the coffers, the price of oil was high. Home prices for home heating was very high and they wanted to try to offset that,” said Susan Marshall, heating assistance program coordinator for the state. 

The legislature created a heating assistance program to help low-income households cope with high fuel prices, she said. The program was a counterpart to the federal Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program, or LIHEAP and helped cover people whose incomes were too high to qualify for LIHEAP.

And that program was tied directly to the price of oil.

Marshall said she would crunch the numbers.

“So, I would go back and look at the price of a barrel of North Slope crude. Take an average of what the price was,” she said.

When the price of oil was high, more money went into the program.

The state also subsidized the federal heating assistance program, so that the lowest-income Alaskans got money from both to help with heating bills.

But, when oil prices crashed — so did the state’s budget.

The state cut the heating assistance program last year in an effort to trim spending.  

The federal LIHEAP program is still in place, but it only serves the lowest-income Alaskans.  

The loss of state funding to that program will drop payments to those households by 30 percent this year, which means that more than 10,300 households in the state will see their benefits reduced or eliminated entirely this year.

The heating assistance benefits are determined based on what type of fuel the household uses for heat — like wood, coal or natural gas, and how big the home is.

Priority goes to homes with older, disabled or young family members.

The benefits also factor how cold a region gets. 

On average homes in Fairbanks and North Pole received almost twice the amount of heating assistance when compared with homes in Anchorage, according to state data.

While the largest numbers of people were cut in urban areas of the state,  the cuts are hitting especially hard in rural areas, where it’s more expensive to live and fuel prices are still high.

In Dillingham, temperatures have been dropping into the 20s and high teens at night.  

“So basically every day we have some kind of crisis application on the phone, which is typical this time of year,” said Rae Belle Whitcomb, who is director of the Workforce Development Center for the Bristol Bay Native Association.

The association serves 28 out of the 31 villages in their region with federal heating assistance. The program pays for everything from heating oil, to wood, and electric bills.

By the second week of November they’ve had more than 260 applications, about one-third of the more than 700 applications they’ll get in Bristol Bay every year.

Out of that, about 110 homes had incomes that are too high to qualify for the federal program.

Whitcomb said they’ve helped people budget, encouraged them to weatherize, turn down thermostats and dress warmer in their homes.

“What can and does happen sometimes is people will move in together. So there’ll be more families living together because they can’t afford not to,” she said.

Whitcomb said she’s hearing from a lot of people who don’t have the income to make up for the loss of heating assistance.

And a big part of that was the cut to the PFD.

Gov. Bill Walker vetoed about half the amount that was supposed to be paid out.

Alaskans got about $1,000 less than what was projected.

“The double whammy of that was huge,” she said.

The cuts hit harder in rural Alaska because not many people have other sources of income.

“You can’t go down and get a McDonald’s job for $9.75 an hour. There’s not many of those other jobs,” she said. 

Whitcomb said the recent warmer winters have made things easier, but she’s worried this year will be much colder.

To see the number of households affected by cuts to the state’s AKAHP heating assistance program this year, see the graphic below.

Data from the Alaska Department of Health and Social Services Division of Heating Assistance.

Large parts of the Southeast are grappling with severe drought.

In some parts of Alabama, there hasn’t been any rain in nearly six weeks. Some farmers are selling off cattle because there’s not enough hay to feed them over the winter.

Denise Croker, a chief ranger with the Georgia Forestry Commission, told the Insurance Journal, “our dirt is like talcum powder.”

The latest U.S. Drought Monitor report, released Thursday, shows parts of Tennessee, North Carolina, Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi under “exceptional drought” conditions.

An even larger swath of the country — from eastern Texas through parts of Arkansas, Louisiana and up to Kentucky — is experiencing less serious, but still severe, drought that threatens crops and has led to water shortages.

Nearly 40 percent of the Southeast is under moderate to exceptional drought conditions, according to the most recent analysis by the Southeast Regional Climate Center.

Jordan McLeod, a regional climatologist at the Southeast Regional Climate Center, told the Los Angeles Times that the Southeastern drought first developed in the spring and “really began to intensify during the summer.”

The Times reports that the reason for the drought is essentially bad weather luck, because recent storms have skipped the driest areas:

“The rains that drenched Louisiana and led to disastrous floods this summer didn’t head east, and the tropical storms that flooded parts of the East Coast didn’t move west.

” ‘Unfortunately those storms did not take a very favorable inland trek that would have brought some much-needed rainfall to interior areas that are under drought,’ McLeod said of recent tropical storms that formed in the Atlantic Ocean and headed toward the U.S.”

The hardest-hit parts of the Southeast, mostly in Georgia and Alabama, are dealing with dryness comparable to the ongoing, catastrophic drought in California. The new report classifies conditions in both parts of the country as long-term droughts, meaning they have been going on six months or more.

In the Southeast, the lack of water also has intensified a decades-long fight between Georgia and Florida over water rights. The main issue is that Florida thinks Georgia — and especially Atlanta — uses too much water from the Chattahoochee River, as Molly Samuel of member station WABE reported this fall.

An October report by the Southeast Regional Climate Center said Lake Lanier, “a major reservoir for Atlanta’s water supply, [was] about 8 feet below its summer pool level.” It also recorded at least 1,000 wildfires in Alabama since late September.

Alabama Gov. Robert Bentley has issued a drought declaration for every county in the state, and the northern half of the state is under a drought emergency, which allows local officials to restrict water use. As of Monday, all of Alabama was under a “no burn” order that bars all outdoor burning, according to the Alabama Forestry Commission.

So far, the Georgia’s Department of Natural Resources has not gone as far. In September, officials began what they called a “level 1 drought response,” which consisted of a public information campaign in 53 counties.

Georgia Gov. Nathan Deal told reporters last week that he would impose water-use restrictions in some parts of the state “very soon,” according to member station WABE. Deal didn’t say when the new restrictions would take effect.

In September, the U.S. Department of Agriculture designated the Georgia counties of Putnam, Baldwin, Greene, Hancock, Jasper, Jones and Morgan as disaster areas due to farmer and rancher losses from the drought. The designation means some farmers in those counties are eligible for “low interest emergency loans from USDA’s Farm Service Agency (FSA).”

The FSA says farmers in those seven counties have eight months, beginning from the Sept. 21 date of the disaster declaration, to apply for loans to help cover losses.

Copyright 2016 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

There were snowy, icy balls everywhere.

Videos and photos from western Siberia, on the Gulf of Ob, showed an entire beach covered in snowballs that had apparently washed ashore. In one image published online by the Siberian Times, a woman sat on the frozen balls. In another, a dog ran near the balls, which had also formed what looked like a vertical mass of balls mashed together into an icy ball-wall.

The BBC reports that the balls started washing up about two weeks ago. They’re strung along some 11 miles of coast and are said to range from about the size of a tennis ball up to almost 3 feet across.

Here’s a video of the beach shot by someone named Valery Togo, who told the Russian news site Vesti Yamal that he lives in the nearby town of Nyda, which is on the Yamal Peninsula just above the Arctic Circle.

The BBC reports the chilled orbs that washed ashore “result from a rare environmental process where small pieces of ice form, are rolled by wind and water, and end up as giant snowballs.” It adds:

“Russian TV quoted an explanation from Sergei Lisenkov, press secretary of the Arctic and Antarctic Research Institute:

” ‘As a rule, first there is a primary natural phenomenon — sludge ice, slob ice. Then comes a combination of the effects of the wind, the lay of the coastline, and the temperature and wind conditions.’

” ‘It can be such an original combination that it results in the formation of balls like these.’ “

The Collins English Dictionary defines “slob ice” as “sludgy masses of floating ice” in Canadian English.

Rare and original as the ball-forming process might be, this is not the first time humans have witnessed these globular creations. In 2010, a Chicago Tribune video showed snowballs that washed up along Lake Michigan.

In 2015, a man waded into the water — again in Lake Michigan — to heft a couple of frozen balls himself, and videotaped it. He and other witnesses to the snowball phenomenon have noted that the main body of water is not frozen even though the balls are.

That same year, waves of icy spheres turned a Maine lake into an undulating ball-mass, captured on video by a Facebook user called Stone Point Studio.

Copyright 2016 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

This late in the fall, Arctic sea ice should be forming near the community of Barrow. Instead, the ocean is open for hundreds of miles.

Barrow also shattered its record for the highest average temperature for October.

Brian Brettschneider is a climatologist in Anchorage who closely tracks Alaska climate data and trends. Alaska’s Energy Desk is checking in with him regularly as part of the segment, Ask A Climatologist.

Brettschneider told Energy Desk editor Annie Feidt Arctic sea ice is at record lows for this time of year.

Transcript:

Brian: As of October 31st, the sea ice was just over seven million square kilometers, which sounds like a lot, but it’s quite a bit lower than any other October 31st on record.

Annie: How concerning is that?

Brian: It’s very concerning because the lack of ice really affects the climate of the entire circumpolar area. So for example Barrow, Kotzebue, all the areas in the northern part of Alaska, saw record warm Octobers in very large part because there’s so much open water with lots of stored heat from the summer months that’s typically locked away by ice at this point in the season.

Annie: How warm was it in Barrow in October?

Brian: It was just over 31 degrees, and that’s by far their warmest October on record- a full 13 degrees above normal.

Annie: And is it the high temperatures making it hard to form sea ice or the lack of sea ice making the temperatures high?

Brian: That all works together- so it’s called a positive feedback. The warm temperatures are really slowing down the creation of new sea ice, and the warm temperatures are adding extra heat to the open water which makes it then even harder to freeze up. So it’s a positive feedback cycle that reinforces itself.

Beaches in the Southeastern U.S. took a tremendous beating last month from Hurricane Matthew. The U.S. Geological Survey has found that the storm washed over and damaged 15 percent of sand dunes on Florida’s Atlantic Coast, 30 percent along Georgia’s coastline and 42 percent of the dunes on South Carolina beaches.

In Florida, few coastal areas were hit harder by the hurricane than the 18 miles of dunes and beaches in Flagler County. County Administrator Craig Coffey says, “What Matthew did to us essentially [was] eat about 30 feet of coastline all the way along the county, and created a bunch of breaches through that dune system.”

Matthew also washed out a big chunk of coastal highway A1A in Flagler Beach. The state and county are working to have that road repaired and open within 45 days. Fixing that highway is important, Coffey says. But he is equally worried about damage to the county’s beaches and dunes, which provide the community with important protection from tides, wave action and storm surge.

When Hurricane Matthew overtopped and breached Flagler County’s beaches, some 800 homes were flooded. Coffey says, “We’re trying to figure out how can we protect those for next hurricane season so we don’t have more breaches. We literally were fighting breaches in about 10 locations.” Flagler County is hoping federal money will be available to help it begin restoring the dunes, which provide protection for hundreds of coastal homes.

Many other communities are facing similar problems. The USGS says 53 miles of dunes were damaged and overtopped in Florida. In Georgia, 32 miles of shoreline were affected. Seventy-seven miles of dunes were damaged in South Carolina.

Hilary Stockdon, a research oceanographer at USGS, says a survey of the beaches compared aerial photos taken before and after the storm. It showed extensive beach erosion all along the Southeast Atlantic coast, Stockdon says, “where waves removed sand from beaches and sharply eroded sand dunes. There were locations where houses were undermined or roads were undermined. And we also saw locations where the sand was pushed inland.”

After small storms, Stockdon says, beaches and dunes can recover naturally. With major storms like Hurricane Matthew, though, sand is washed inland and bulldozed away, she says. Restoring sand dunes after those events often requires big engineering projects.

Copyright 2016 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.