Biodiverse And Remote, Yukon's Qikaqktaruk Island Is Literally Dissolving Into The Sea As Permafrost Melts

[hatrack]

Ed. - If you have time, please click the link. I can't paste the videos but they're staggering, bordering on surreal.

Last summer, the western Arctic was uncomfortably hot. Smoke from Canada’s wildfires hung thick in the air, and swarms of mosquitoes searched for exposed skin. It was a maddening combination that left researchers on Qikiqtaruk, an island off the north coast of the Yukon, desperate for relief. And so on a late July afternoon, a team of Canadian scientists dived into the Beaufort Sea, bobbing and splashing in a sheltered bay for nearly two hours. Later, as they lay sprawled on a beach, huge chunks of the island they were studying slid into the ocean.

“The land was giving us hints of what was to come,” says Richard Gordon, a senior ranger “Days before, we found all these puddles of clear water. But it hadn’t rained at all in days; you look up and see nothing but blue sky. “Now we know: all of that ice in the permafrost had melted. The signs were there. We just didn’t know.” Over the next two weeks, the landslides happened again and again. Throughout the small island, the tundra sheared off in more than 700 different locations. Some collapses were quick, soil ripping from the land with a damp thunderclap. Others were slow, with land “rippling and rolling like a carpet” down the slope, says Isla Myers-Smith, an ecology professor at the University of British Columbia.

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Lying just off the Canadian mainland, Qikiqtaruk is a mass of sediment and permafrost piled up during the last ice age. Despite its small size, the island is packed with immense ecological richness, with waters teeming with beluga whales and trout-like Dolly Varden char. On land, it is one of the few places on Earth where black, grizzly and polar bears cross paths. Musk ox and caribou browse the lichen. The land is thickly carpeted with more than 200 species of wildflowers, grasses and shrubs. For the Inuvialuit, the island continues to be a hunting and fishing ground that for nearly a thousand years sustained communities through dark and bitter winters.

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Increasingly, chunks of land hundreds of metres wide will rip away – a phenomenon known as active layer detachment. Unlike other types of permafrost, with high levels of rock or soil, Qikiqtaruk’s permafrost is disproportionately made of ice, making it uniquely susceptible to immense and powerful geological forces when that ice melts. “It feels like we’re at the frontier of change on this island, where the fabric of the landscape itself is tearing apart,” says Ciara Norton, a Team Shrub research assistant. “These massive permafrost disturbance events are going to continue to happen – and yet we don’t really know what that means.” One thing is clear: the constant landslides are the latest in a string of challenges that have made studying the island increasingly difficult. Bush planes cannot land on Qikiqtaruk when puddles of seawater are present – and they have become a near-constant presence on the low-lying gravel airstrip. Fog smothers the cove and grounds helicopters for days. Unpredictable storms keep boats away. In mid-August this year, Team Shrub was trapped on the island for an extra 12 days.

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https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/nov/21/canada-arctic-herschel-island-qikiqtaruk-climate-permafrost-tundra-ecology-aoe

[Callie1979]

1. Amazing article.