In the Northwest Arctic, damaging late-season storms could also be delaying sea ice formation

Last October, flooding from a storm that hit the Northwest Arctic displaced 60 residents and caused widespread damage in Kotzebue. Two families lost their homes. The flooding also affected smaller, nearby communities like Deering and Shishmaref.

Cyrus Harris has lived in Kotzebue for most of his life. Looking back on the storm, he said it “caused one of the bigger floods in this area and affected many people mentally, physically. And there was a lot that was lost,” Harris said. “Just suddenly, it’s 10 feet higher than what it was.”

Climatologists say fall storms in the region are becoming more intense and frequent because of human-caused climate change. And they say that Arctic sea ice is forming later each year.

This fall, ice coverage was at a near-historic low. Now, as winter sets in, local observers and researchers believe fall storms may have caused much thinner ice conditions than normal.

“When we say climate change, it is just not one particular time of the year,” Harris said. “What’s happening during the early fall or late summer, it’s affecting what’s going to be happening during the fall —, freeze-up and so forth.”

A recent study in the Northern Bering Sea found that record-thin sea ice during the winter of 2018-2019 may have had longer-term ecological repercussions. Researchers linked the scarcity of ice that year to harmful algal blooms, a northern migration of predatory fish like Pacific Cod, and widespread marine mammal and bird die-offs. For Alaska as a whole, the summer of 2019 was one of the hottest on record.

“It was a year to really remember,” said Harris. “I mean, we had open water all year round, just about five miles out from here. It was very challenging to be hunting [for bearded seals] out on the ice floes”

Harris said Kotzebue Sound has been freezing up about 45 days later than historic averages — around Christmastime instead of Halloween.

“We do depend on good, solid freeze-up cycles and thaw-out cycles, you know, for safe travels to and from.” said Harris. “But now we’re learning a new thing, the freeze-up cycles are happening much later.”

Many people in the region use snow machines to travel over solid sea or river ice between villages or to hunting camps.

Rick Thoman is a climate scientist with the University of Alaska Fairbanks. Thoman said this year’s late ice isn’t unique to Northwest Alaska.

“This is all part of a bigger picture.” Thoman told KOTZ in mid-December, when most of the region’s shorefast ice still hadn’t set up. “The entire Arctic is the lowest on record for this point in the season.”

Thoman said the fall storms and warm weather in the region likely contributed to ice forming later.

Sea ice doesn’t form equally. Shorefast ice, in shallow marine water, forms first. Thoman said it acts like an extension of the land, protecting the shoreline from large waves and storm surges that can erode coastlines. According to Thoman, the sooner it forms, the better.

“Every day we don’t have ice, there’s one less day that has to thicken up,” he said.

Bobby Schaeffer, a longtime local, is a retired fisherman and an observer with Alaska Arctic Observatory and Knowledge Hub.

“When I was a boy, back in the ‘50s and ‘60s, and my dad used to go out to make holes for his mom so we could go fish tomcod and smelt,” said Schaeffer. “I made a hole yesterday. It’s 14 inches out here. Normally it’s four-to-five-foot, back in the day.”

He said December temperatures in Kotzebue used to dip down to -30s or -40s.

“We are now in December, one of our coldest months, and we barely got below zero this year,” he said.

Schaeffer has noticed other climatic changes: higher river water, intense fall storms, more vegetation, species like beavers that are migrating north, and poor salmon runs. This year, Kotzebue Sound had its worst commercial salmon season on record.

Like Schaeffer, Cyrus Harris said later sea ice formations are becoming the “new normal” in the Arctic.

“You know, we observe and watch the temperatures. It’s a lot that our Elders before us, you know, paid attention to, is the ice formation around this time of the year, said Harris. “But now, with all these changes. You know, it could start forming. Give it a couple weeks, and it’s not there anymore.”

These days, Harris is in a role like the Elders he grew up listening to. And now, already into January, Harris said he’s still watching and waiting for the ice to thicken up.