Weller gave us a lift to one of the worst-affected neighbourhoods in the city – the aptly named Madcap Lane, where most of the wooden one-storey properties were sagging and distorted in several directions. On the right-hand side one house was tilting sideways, the guttering at one end about a foot further from the roof than at the other. The wonky front steps barely fitted into the porch. I climbed them carefully and knocked on the door.
‘I work nights, and I’ve just gone to bed,’ complained the woman who opened it, glaring at me through sleepy eyes, hair standing up in all directions.
‘It’s our house, it’s not a museum,’ added her teenage daughter irritably from behind the half-closed door. I backed off, and let Franny and Karen take over. Within a few minutes they were deep in conversation with the woman, Vicki Heiker, who soon invited us inside.
Vicki’s daughter Jessica was also smiling now. ‘Here, look at this.’ She placed a pencil at one end of the kitchen table. It quickly rolled off the other end onto the floor.
‘Can you do it again with me filming?’ asked Franny, and Jessica happily obliged. Her mother watched them and laughed. ‘When you spill something it’s like you don’t have much of a chance. You’ve got to clean it up fast otherwise it’ll get away from you.’
‘Do you get used to it?’ I asked.
‘Well, it helps build up your calf muscles since you’re always walking uphill.’ In the sitting room a large dog was jumping around excitedly, shedding dark hairs all over the furniture. Vicki bent down next to a stack of glass shelves in the corner, and pointed to an inch-thick triangle of wood under one of its legs.
‘That’s a shim. It’s elevating that leg to make the whole thing level. Otherwise it would just fall over.’
‘Sometimes my bedroom door won’t shut all the way either,’ Jessica chimed in. ‘Here,’ she went on, changing the subject, ‘do you want to see my pet ferret?’
‘I don’t think anything here is entirely level,’ continued Vicki, ignoring the struggling animal, which broke free from her daughter’s grasp and bolted behind the sofa. ‘You’ve seen the front porch? Well, my son had to come round last week because it fell off.’
I wandered back into the kitchen, where Karen was taking pictures of an impressive-looking crack which snaked out from above the kitchen window. The window was itself askew, and looking through it I could see the house across the street also tilting – in the opposite direction. The whole place was like a badly built Toyland.
‘It’s a trip, isn’t it?’ smiled Vicki, coming up beside me. ‘You look out of here and it makes you feel dizzy.’
But Vicki and Jessica’s house was far from being the worst example. On the way back to our guesthouse the taxi driver took us on a detour up a very narrow track lined with dirty snowbanks. At the end was a log cabin which looked as if it had been pitched into a gigantic hole: it was tilted at an angle that was at least 20 degrees.
‘I stuck it out until two years ago,’ said the elderly woman who had been forced out into a different house nearby. ‘The water and electricity still work, you know. And when my husband first built it back in 1957 the ground was completely flat.’ She shook her head in disbelief.
Roads all around Fairbanks are affected by thawing permafrost: driving over the gentle undulations is like being at sea in a gentle swell. In some places the damage is more dramatic – crash barriers have bent into weird contortions, and wide cracks fracture the dark tarmac. Permafrost damage costs now total $35 million every year, money mostly spent on repairs to affected roads.3
Forests are affected too. Some areas of once-flat land look like bomb-sites, pockmarked with craters – sometimes several feet deep – where permafrost ice underneath them has melted and drained away. These uneven landscapes cause ‘drunken forests’, a phenomenon that has been reported right across Alaska. I saw plenty of evidence of this around Fairbanks: in one spot a long gash had been torn through the tall spruce trees, leaving them toppling over towards each other. Most of them were dying, some already lifeless, their brittle branches snapping off as I pushed through to take a closer look.
Permafrost degradation is one of the clearest signals that something unprecedented is happening in the far north. In Siberian cities hundreds of tall buildings have begun to subside and crack.4 Whole ecosystems are disappearing too: the Boreal forests which have grown throughout the region since the end of the last Ice Age are now collapsing into marshy bogs as the ground underneath thaws out. In Alaska, spruce and birch forests are being replaced by wetland – in some areas a quarter of the forest has disappeared in the last forty years.5
Whole sections of coastline are breaking off and falling into the sea, as the ice which has kept cliffs solid for centuries begins to melt. In both Canada and Siberia losses of up to forty metres a year have been observed, and in Alaska over half a kilometre has eroded from some stretches of coastline over the past few decades.6 This may not matter too much when nobody lives there – but many of these coastal areas have been inhabited by indigenous peoples for centuries.
And in Shishmaref, on the west coast of Alaska, the Native Americans who have lived on the same site for decades now live in daily terror of the sea.
SHISHMAREF
It was impossible to tell that Shishmaref was even on the coast. Although the village is actually squeezed onto a long, narrow barrier island, all I could see as our small aircraft looped over the area was a grey airstrip and about a hundred houses in the middle of an immense white plain. A layer of heavy grey cloud hung over the entire area, meeting the horizon in an apparently infinite expanse of nothingness. On the ground it was chilly to say the least: the temperature hovered around minus fifteen Celsius, and a few snow grains blew in the biting northwesterly wind.
Shishmaref is about as far west as you can get on the entire North American landmass. The tip of the Seward Peninsula, on which the village sits, is barely a hundred kilometres from the eastern edge of Russian Siberia. The International Date Line runs through the middle of the freezing Chukchi Sea which separates the two coastlines, meaning that the same morning sun rises a whole day later on the Alaskan side.
The two landmasses are so near that their peoples are closely related too. Almost all Shishmaref’s residents are Inupiat Eskimos, who share a close language and ancestry with their Siberian Eskimo relatives. (Unlike in Canada and Greenland, the name ‘Inuit’ never caught on in Alaska, and the terms ‘Eskimo’ and ‘Indian’ are still universally used to describe the two culturally distinct Native Alaskan first peoples, both by themselves and by Alaskans of non-Native descent.)
Indeed Alaskan Eskimo hunters, cut off from home by open-water leads appearing behind them in the sea ice, would sometimes accidentally spend entire summers in Siberia. A lost hunter’s family would never give up hope until the following winter, when men who had survived would return back over the newly frozen ice.
You still have to be careful out on the ice, Robert Iyatunguk, Shishmaref’s ‘erosion co-ordinator’, told me as he showed me round the village. Anyone who falls through into the water has only minutes to strip completely and change into dry clothes before they freeze to death. And sometimes the ice does strange things: ‘I was once out there on an ice floe with some friends and got this weird feeling of danger,’ he recalled. ‘We all cleared off and immediately the whole floe started to turn over.’ There is safety in numbers – no one goes out alone, and a group of hunters will always share the harvest equally.
Until comparatively recently Shishmaref’s entire food and clothing supply came from the surrounding environment: polar bears, seals, fish, walrus and caribou. Though dog sleds and bone arrows have now been exchanged for snowmachines and guns, and Eskimo kayaks replaced by wooden or fibreglass boats, ‘subsistence’ living