After the latest catastrophic storm hit Western Alaska, displacing more than 1,500 people, killing at least one and leaving villages in ruins, residents face an existential crisis.
Will the wide delta that fans out between the lower Yukon and Kuskokwim Rivers and has supported one of the circumpolar north’s largest Indigenous populations for millennia continue to be a place where Alaska’s Yupik people can live?
One Elder has his doubts.
“We’re not going to be well. Storms are going to get worse, and it’s not going to be livable,” said Mike Williams Sr., a tribal leader from the Kuskokwim River village of Akiak. “We’re past the tipping point, maybe.”
Fairbanks-based scientist Torre Jorgenson, who has studied the region for decades, has doubts as well.
Intertwined climate change forces make long-term prospects grim in the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta, according to a wide-ranging scientific study led by Jorgenson. The study was published in mid-August, just two months before the remnants of Typhoon Halong hit on Oct. 12.
Coastal erosion, permafrost thaw, sea-level rise, and the intrusion of saltwater into freshwater systems are combining with storm surges to dramatically transform the coastal area, damaging communities and the food resources that have sustained Yup’ik people for centuries, the study said.
Of the 18 villages on the outer coastal area of the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta, at least 10 will likely have to be relocated, said Jorgenson, who is affiliated with the University of Alaska Fairbanks while operating an independent science consulting company.
The at-risk villages sit atop permafrost that, when intact, is a platform a meter or two above the region’s salt marshes, Jorgenson said. That permafrost is no longer intact, and it will likely disappear in the next two to three decades, he said.
“So the ground is going down, and the water is coming up, and they’ll be unlivable,” Jorgenson said.
If those villages move, they will follow the lead of Newtok. The village of about 350 escaped erosion and flooding by moving farther inland to a site called Mertarvik, but the effort took decades and is still challenged by infrastructure problems.
Williams Sr., of Akiak, said it is not easy for coastal villages to find suitable relocation spots. “Even though they head toward higher ground, there’s a lot of wind in the higher ground,” he said.
But some residents of Kipnuk and Kwigillingok are determined to stay and rebuild, and others who evacuated to return.
“We will go back because it’s our home,” said Missy Chuckwuk of Kipnuk, waiting in line to board an evacuation flight in Bethel on Wednesday, Oct. 15 with her husband and their three children. Once freeze-up hits, the community will begin to move homes back that floated away, she said.
An estimated 50 to 100 people stayed and did not evacuate from Kipnuk, according to a representative with the Alaska National Guard, and 200 to 300 people remained in Kwigillingok.
Jorgenson said necessary action in the most at-risk villages will be expensive.
“They can do kind of short-term adaptation, but over the period of decades they are going to be looking at having to relocate, and there’s going to be a huge, enormous cost to that,” Jorgenson said. Newtok’s relocation cost hundreds of millions of dollars, he noted. “And if you’re looking at 10 or more villages that have to move, who’s going to come up with the money for that?”
Combined climate change forces amplify each other
For the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta, the connected climate change forces include sea ice retreat. It erases the frozen barrier that prevented waves from reaching shore during late-fall and winter storms. By the end of the century, Jorgenson said, the ice-free season in the Bering Sea will last approximately 8.5 months, with ice forming two months later in the fall and melting a month earlier in the spring.
Bering Sea residents already got a taste of the future in 2018, Jorgenson said, when winter ice was scarcer than at any time in the past 150 years of records.
Storm surges and floods enhance permafrost thaw, Jorgenson said. Saltwater pushed ashore kills tundra plants that make up an insulating mat, thus allowing more heat to penetrate the surface and thaw more permafrost.
Beyond damaging homes and villages, the changes hurt people’s ability to gather wild food in their traditional ways, Jorgensen said.
Earlier sea ice melt exposes coastal regions to more flooding in the critical spring nesting season time for migratory birds that are residents’ sources of eggs and meat, Jorgenson said. Saltwater intrusion is changing habitat for migrating birds that use the region, which is a major nesting and breeding site for several species. Saltwater intrusion also contaminates drinking water supplies. Permafrost thaw undermines the once-stable areas that have been long used for traditional hunting camps and that have produced wild food, he said.
“These permafrost plateaus are really very rich areas,” Jorgenson said. “Those have been really important berry picking areas, and those are going to disappear pretty soon.”
The origins of this fall’s storm, like that of Typhoon Merbok three years ago, lie far to the west in the North Pacific Ocean. There, water has become hotter; a new marine heatwave is currently underway. The ocean heat amplifies seasonal storms that reach Alaska, like Typhoon Halong and Typhoon Merbok, which sent destructive floods and high winds across the region in 2022.
While Typhoon Merbok formed in a part of the ocean that is normally too cool to produce typhoons and Typhoon Halong formed in a more standard ocean spot, both storms picked up intensity from unusual North Pacific heat, said Rick Thoman, a scientist with the Alaska Center for Climate Assessment and Preparedness at the University of Alaska Fairbanks.
“Passing over near or at-record warm sea surface temperatures outside of the tropics, that’s something that both of those storms have in common,” Thoman said.
Such ocean heat will not always be present, but it is likely to be more frequent, Thoman said. “The trend is going only one way,” he said.
People of the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta recognize the trend.
Alaska Federation of Natives co-chair Ana Hoffman, in her opening address at the organization’s annual convention on Oct. 16, spoke directly to her fellow Yup’ik people about it, hundreds of whom had been evacuated by then to Anchorage.
“You were at the forefront of this recent storm and endured what is now becoming a new reality here: typhoons in the Arctic,” Hoffman said.
Climate change threats in the Yukon-Kuskokwim (Y-K) Delta and other parts of rural Alaska have long been recognized by state and federal government agencies, and by state and regional organizations like the Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium and the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta Subsistence Regional Advisory Council.
Williams Sr. said that there have been warnings for several decades. Speaking during a break on Oct. 14 in this week’s Elders and Youth Conference in Anchorage, he said he remembers listening to Elders talk 50 years ago about the big changes to come.
“They said, ‘The weather is going to be changing, and we’re going to have more frequent storms, and it’s going to get warmer,’” Williams Sr. said,
Those predictions came true, Williams Sr. said.
“We used to have 7 feet of ice on the river; now it’s 3 feet. And the permafrost is going away pretty fast. Tundra communities are sinking,” Williams Sr. said.
State Sen. Lyman Hoffman, who has represented Western Alaska for four decades, attested to similar observations.
“There has been more and more warming that is disrupting lives in the Y-K Delta,” the Bethel Democrat said at an Oct. 13 news conference held by Gov. Mike Dunleavy.
Alaska House Speaker Bryce Edgmon, I-Dillingham, said the latest storm should be seen as a call to action.
“We know this is not going to be, unfortunately, the last typhoon,” Edgmon said in his address on Oct. 17 at the Alaska Federation of Natives Conference. “We need to be very conscious about living in a state with a changing climate.” That is necessary for “a future that doesn’t involve waking up in the middle of the night and having water come up from your floor, and 100-mile-an-hour winds, and your house floating off somewhere,” he said.
Trump administration cuts
The Trump administration, however, does not share that perspective.
The administration canceled previously awarded grants intended to prevent damages in rural Alaska from disasters that have been exacerbated by climate change – including a $20 million grant for coastal erosion control in Kipnuk, a village of about 700 that was one of the communities hardest hit by ex-typhoon Halong.
The Kipnuk grant was among several awarded during the Biden administration to rural Alaska communities under the Environmental Protection Agency’s Community Change Grant Program. The grants were for work like permafrost and shoreline protection, renewable energy development, and permafrost protection.
Trump administration officials characterized those projects as unnecessary projects. In a post on the social media site X, EPA Administrator Lee Zelden called them “wasteful DEI and Environmental Justice grants.”
EPA officials defended the cut.
“The ‘environmental justice’ funding cancelled by EPA would not have prevented or safeguarded the community from the mass destruction and tragedy caused by such a large and devastating typhoon,” Brigit Hirsch, the agency’s press secretary, said by email on Oct. 17.
Administration cuts to the National Weather Service, part of broader cuts to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, likely had an effect on the weather forecast and interfered with preparations for ex-typhoon Halong’s impacts in Alaska.
Thoman said predictions for Typhoon Halong’s path into Alaska, made after Trump administration cuts forced reductions in rural Alaska weather staff and monitoring, were not as accurate as those for Typhoon Merbok in 2022. Atmospheric observations from weather balloons have been cut in Kotzebue, Bethel, St. Paul, and Cold Bay, and technical problems prevented the normal launches in Nome, he noted. “It’s almost inconceivable that that lack of upper-air observations had no effect,” he said.
The Government Accounting Office (GAO) has already identified National Weather Service cuts as a problem. The shortage of meteorologists has created a need for “urgent action” to protect aviation safety, said a GAO report issued on Aug. 28.
Also axed by the Trump administration was a Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) program aimed at preventing disaster damage; a statement from the agency called Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities program “wasteful and ineffective,” even though earlier analysis found it saved $6 in response cost for every $1 in preparation spending.
Overall, Trump administration cuts to FEMA have undermined the agency’s ability to respond to disasters that are increasing in frequency, according to a Sept. 2 GAO report. FEMA has lost about a tenth of its staff, compromising its capabilities, and there are similar concerns about disaster responses at the Environmental Protection Agency and the United States Army Corps of Engineers, the GAO said.
In the short term, Alaska Native organizations were waiting this week for FEMA assistance. Resolutions passed by the Association of Village Council Presidents, a group of Yup’ik tribal governments, and the Yukon Kuskokwim Health Corporation, the largest tribal health provider for the region, and other groups have requested a presidential disaster declaration and the aid that comes with it.
On Oct. 16, Gov. Dunleavy sent a formal request for a presidential declaration, not just for the Yukon-Kuskokwim area but also for northwestern Alaska, which was lashed days earlier by remnants of the typhoon.
As of Oct. 17 the disaster response was being led by the state, according to a FEMA statement. But opportunities for immediate action beyond evacuations and temporary shelter were limited.
“There is very little time to do anything, like even dry stuff out at this point,” Thoman said. “Winter is nigh.”
Corinne Smith contributed to this story.