An arctic hamlet is sinking into the thawing permafrost

TUKTOYAKTUK, Canada — On the shore of Lake Tiktalik in Canada’s Western Arctic, the thawing permafrost had set off two huge landslides into the water, leaving yawning craters on the tundra. These “thaw slumps” measured several hundred feet wide and just as deep.

Jaden Cockney, 17, clambered down the side of one slump as his boss, William Dillon, looked on cautiously. Cockney was part of the team that Dillon, 69, had created to measure the retreating permafrost. Only a few decades earlier, the permafrost had lain just several inches below much of the region’s surface. But now it was thawing so rapidly that it was being pushed farther and farther underground. Along shorelines, it collapsed into lakes or the Arctic Ocean.

For centuries, the Western Arctic has been home to Dillon and his ancestors, the Inuvialuit, as the region’s Inuit are called. But these days, the thaw slumps — like the one Dillon’s team was documenting 10 miles south of their hamlet, Tuktoyaktuk — are the most dramatic evidence of a phenomenon that could turn the local Inuvialuit into Canada’s first climate refugees.

Tuktoyaktuk itself now stands face to face with the Arctic Ocean’s increasingly angry Beaufort Sea, and rests atop 1,300 feet to 1,600 feet of thawing permafrost threatening to sink it.

At the bottom of the slump, the teenager advanced by leaping from mounds of solid-looking dirt to torn patches of tundra, avoiding the clay-like mud where he would have sunk. He was about to explore what even many permafrost scientists never manage to see up close.

Poking his measuring probe here and there, he approached a large column of ice that was somehow still standing. All around, the permafrost had vanished, leaving behind a chaotic landscape strewed with jagged patches of tundra, uprooted brown shrubs and previously frozen dirt that had turned into mud with sudden violence. Long-trapped organic matter was released, giving off the smell of freshly peeled potatoes and unlocking methane and carbon dioxide — both climate-warming gases — into the atmosphere.

Cockney led the monitors back to higher ground and crept toward the edge of the thaw slump.

“Billy, can I go and take a look?” he asked Dillon without stopping.

The permafrost had disappeared under the slump’s edge. Only a layer of tundra projected into the air and could have easily collapsed under Cockney’s weight.

“Billy, did you see where I was standing? Did you see the overhang?”

Later, his excitement subsided, Cockney was still unsure of the significance of what he had seen. Did he worry about having to leave Tuktoyaktuk?

“I don’t know, not really, kind of,” he said, then added, “Maybe as I get older, I might.”

Cockney was in 10th grade and worked as a monitor so that he could save for a snowmobile. His boss had been monitoring the land for three decades. Dillon did not think Tuktoyaktuk would disappear in his lifetime, but he was certain it would in Cockney’s.

“Nobody really wants to take the responsibility for saying we have to move,” Dillon said, adding, “But the whole hamlet will be relocated.”

A quarter of the world’s permafrost

Only a couple of decades ago, people burying loved ones in Tuktoyaktuk’s cemetery first had to light a fire. When enough of the permafrost just beneath the tundra had melted, a grave would be deep enough and a body could be laid to rest.

Nowadays, in some corners of the cemetery, probes are too short to find the permafrost. Along a deep fissure running across the cemetery, gravesites have caved in and crosses lean in the same direction like dominoes ready to topple over. Families had filled other gravesites with gravel to save them.

“If I ever become a billionaire, my family’s moving with me,” Dillon said, near a cross bearing the name of Eddie Tex Dillon, an older brother who had served as a mayor of the hamlet. “Go find some solid granite to bury my people in.”

The fate of the cemetery is one of the most sensitive issues to locals.

“We don’t ever relocate a cemetery in our Inuvialuit culture,” said Erwin Elias, Tuktoyaktuk’s mayor. “But we don’t want kids to be seeing coffins floating out into the ocean.”

About 1,000 people live in Tuktoyaktuk, a community that grew during the Cold War as a station for a continentwide anti-Soviet radar system. Dillon, whose parents were employed at several stations, worked for a Canadian oil company when Tuktoyaktuk became a hub for exploration in the Western Arctic in the 1970s. Now Tuktoyaktuk has become a hot spot for global permafrost research.

A decrease in sea ice because of warming weather has contributed to the Arctic’s heating up four times as fast as the global average in the past four decades, making the region one of the hardest hit by climate change. Warmer temperatures have caused the thawing of the Earth’s permafrost — ice mixed with soil, sand and organic matter that has been continuously frozen, some for hundreds of thousands of years.

Canada has about a quarter of the world’s permafrost — the most after Russia — and in its Western Arctic, thaw slumps have increased in recent years, said Dustin Whalen, a Canadian government physical scientist who began researching in the region two decades ago.

Back then, thaw slumps were limited to areas most susceptible to warming, Whalen said. “Now they seem to be everywhere.”

Whalen helped start the monitoring program in 2019, training Dillon and other Inuvialuit. No other community keeps such close track of the permafrost, providing continuous data to scientists, Whalen said. But now other experts from all over the world have gravitated to the hamlet.

“We really have very little understanding of half of the world’s permafrost, which is in Russia, other than what we can glean from satellites,” said Christopher Burn, a permafrost expert at Carleton University in Ottawa and former president of the International Permafrost Association.

But Tuktoyaktuk is a window. “What is happening there is being replicated around the Arctic,” Burn said.

At this point, the climate-warming gases discharged by degrading permafrost are believed to be offset by the concomitant growth of vegetation that absorbs carbon, Burn said. But scientists believe that in the next 10 to 15 years, if climate change stays on its current trajectory, the permafrost regions will become net emitters of greenhouse gases, he said.

“By the end of the century,” Burn said, “we will have emissions from permafrost that are equivalent to the third or fourth most-emitting country in the world.”

‘It will go’

Dillon didn’t need to open his yellow notebook to remember when he first noticed a startling sight outside a red house perched on a promontory jutting into Tuktoyaktuk’s inland harbor, the one protected by a shrinking barrier island.

“Aug. 16, 2023 — this is when we first noticed it,” he said.

Under the house, the thawing permafrost revealed — alarmingly — that the building rested mostly on sand. The adjoining land was scarred with telltale fissures and parts of the shoreline were slumping into the water. The monitors now visit the red house regularly to record the transformation.

Calvin Pokiak came out of his house and stood on his front porch, next to a large cross and a blue angel on his home’s facade. A wheelbarrow, a satellite dish, a barbecue grill, a Spider-Man swimming kickboard and other items formed a makeshift wall around the back of his house — to prevent his grandchildren from wandering onto the unstable ground.

“Once you expose that permafrost back there, it’s going to erode so fast that you wouldn’t even know what could happen,” Pokiak, 69, said, adding that everything around him appeared to be sinking.

“I’ll have a Pokiak Island,” he added with a burst of laughter.

Dillon had known Pokiak long enough to understand that his laughter hid extreme anxiety. Both men had been classmates at an Anglican residential school, and as adults Pokiak had been Dillon’s boss at the Inuvialuit Land Administration, a regional organization that manages land owned by the Inuvialuit people. Dillon had worked as an environmental monitor there for 27 years.

Like others in town, Pokiak didn’t want to leave. He built his house three decades ago, and his two brothers erected their own houses nearby, and they called the area “Pokesville.” As the two men sat at his kitchen table, he pressed Dillon for information on how bad the permafrost was.

“Those two sloping sites, they’re moving downward,” Dillon told Pokiak. “And if those two are moving, this is moving as well, Calvin.”

“Yeah,” Pokiak said, adding after a long pause, “I mean, personally, I think I was happy I moved out here. I mean, I couldn’t be any happier than where I am right now.”

He went on, “But now that William and these guys are doing all of these measurements and studies, if I have to move my house, I would do it.”

“Here’s the other thing I’ve learned, Calvin,” Dillon said. “Your house and your brother Ernest’s house are both sitting on sand, and there’s hardly any permafrost left in that sand.”

“Yeah,” Pokiak said.

“You’re sliding, and that’s why you’re sloping in the back,” Dillon said. “All that sand is going to come out — and it will go.”

“Yeah,” Pokiak said.

“No if’s, no but’s, it will go.”

“That’s why, like I said,” Pokiak said, “I’m very careful about who goes behind my house.”

“Once that is gone,” Pokiak said about the permafrost, before erupting in laughter — “I’m going to have to put my house on pontoons.”

Buying time

Tuktoyaktuk relocated a tiny slice of itself in 2020.

On one day in April, three houses at risk of falling into the ocean near the tip of the peninsula were moved on an ice road to their new home, not far from Pokiak’s red house.

They were lowered next to one another onto flat gravel surfaces that have become what Dillon described as a “roller coaster,” evidence of the permafrost’s relentless thawing.

The move, Elias, the town’s mayor, said had been “a rush thing” and the lots were so small that there was no room for shifting.

Elias described other planned projects, including the installation of more large rocks along the shoreline and in front of a barrier island, a $54 million project financed by the federal government.

The work, he acknowledged without prodding, was Sisyphean. “The thing is you can’t just up and leave. So this will sustain us for the next 20, 30 years. It’ll buy us time to come up with a plan to relocate.”

For now, few in Tuktoyaktuk were ready to accept the town’s inevitable fate — not even Shayne Cockney, who lived with her two children in one of three houses that had been relocated.

Her house — a squat yellow box under a triangle-shaped roof — now rests on a dozen four-legged jacks. When the ground shifts, the height of certain jacks is adjusted to prevent the house from leaning too much in one direction.

When she hired a contractor over the summer, one side of the house was 4 inches lower than the other. The shifting has caused cracks in her walls and warping in her window frames, allowing freezing winter air to seep in. Chimes hanging from the ceiling next to her kitchen clinked when strong winds rattled her house.

Shayne Cockney, 33, had grown up in the house. She had left the hamlet to study, but returned to live in the house and to take care of her grandmother, who died during the pandemic.

“It’s been really scary because we were so uneven,” she said sitting at her kitchen table. “I’m hoping that this year it is a little bit more sturdy now that the ground is,” she paused and looked at Dillon, “more settled?”

Dillon, who had been quiet, finally told her the ground under her would never settle.

“Your best choice would be to move,” he said.

“Re-move?”

“Re-move.”

“But where?”

“That’s exactly,” Dillon said, “everybody’s question.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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