How does climate change influence the speed that Arctic coastal regions are retreating? This is what a recent study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences hopes to address as an international team of researchers investigated how sea-level rise, permafrost loss, and coastal erosion resulting from climate change is impacting Arctic coastal communities. This study has the potential to help researchers, climate scientists, and the public better understand the short- and long-term effects of climate change on communities and the steps that can be taken to adapt or mitigate them.
“Compound climate impacts accelerate coastal change,” said Dr. Roger Creel, who is a postdoctoral scholar in Department of Physical Oceanography at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute and lead author of the study. “There is this nonlinear acceleration in coastal impacts that we should be expecting will happen in places like Northern Alaska.”
For the study, the researchers examined satellite data and computer models to ascertain the long-term impacts in Alaska’s Arctic Coastal Plain (ACP), specifically regarding how the sea-level rise would impact coastal communities. In the end, the researchers discovered that between 6-8x additional ACP land will experience significant erosion by the year 2100, drastically impacting human and animal communities, including damaging between 40 to 65 percent of current ACP village infrastructure and between 10 to 20 percent of oilfield infrastructure in the region, with oil being a significant source of revenue for the State of Alaska.
“Along ice-rich permafrost coastlines, the land surface is falling faster than the sea levels are rising,” said Dr. Pier Paul Overduin, who is a senior scientist at the Alfred Wegener Institute Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research and a co-author on the study. “Over the coming decades, permafrost thaw subsidence will move the coastline farther inland than coastal erosion or sea level rise alone will move it, and this subsidence will dominate Arctic coastal change over the long term.”
The ACP is comprised of the northern shoreline of Alaska encompassing coastal communities and oilfields responsible for driving the Alaskan oil economy. Given its geographic location, this region is particularly susceptible to sea-level rise and permafrost melt resulting from climate change, thus making this study paramount in better understanding the effects of climate change on this region.
What new discoveries will researchers make about climate change and Arctic coastal regions in the coming years and decades? Only time will tell, and this is why we science!
As always, keep doing science & keep looking up!
Sources: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, EurekAlert!, Wikipedia
Featured Image: Image of permafrost degradation near Point Lonely, Alaska. (Credit: Benjamin M. Jones/Institute of Northern Engineering/University of Alaska Fairbanks)