Word: shishmaref
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Shishmaref is melting into the ocean. Over the past 30 years, the Inupiaq Eskimo village, perched on a slender barrier island 625 miles north of Anchorage, has lost 100 ft. to 300 ft. of coastline--half of it since 1997. As Alaska's climate warms, the permafrost beneath the beaches is thawing and the sea ice is thinning, leaving its 600 residents increasingly vulnerable to violent storms. One house has collapsed, and 18 others had to be moved to higher ground, along with the town's bulk-fuel tanks...
...Weyiouanna. Because a loaded snowmobile would break through the ice, the elders these days have to drag their boats seven miles across the ice to go hunting--and the season begins in May instead of June. "If the weather keeps changing," says Nayokpuk, "it will mean the end of Shishmaref...
...fate of one stubborn little village normally wouldn't make much of a splash. But Shishmaref and other Alaskan settlements are attracting national attention because scientists see them as gloomy harbingers. "Shishmaref is the canary in the coal mine--an indicator of what's to come elsewhere," says Gunter Weller, director of the University of Alaska's Cooperative Institute for Arctic Research...
...must be said that if Shishmaref sinks beneath the waves, it won't be much of a loss to global tourism. The village is so remote that no road connects it to the outside world. The occasional barge unloads fuel after the ice breaks up, and when the weather is good, battered bush planes ferry in DVDs and cartons of Cheetos from the Sam's Club in Fairbanks. Visually, this village is nothing like the romantic images of Eskimos in igloos from old National Geographic magazines. Weathered clapboard houses, surrounded by rusty engine parts, sit helter-skelter along muddy paths...
Still, like many of Alaska's native villages, Shishmaref clings to its subsistence culture. The town supports 10 dog teams, and a local musher, Herbie Nayokpuk, is known statewide as the Shishmaref Cannonball for his top-place finishes in the Iditarod race. Walrus-tusk carving is taught in school, along with the Inupiaq language. And if the town itself is ugly, it is balanced by the desolate beauty of the slate-colored sea, the ducks flying in formation over the lagoon and the musk ox roaming in emerald meadows dotted with wild cotton. Some two-thirds of the local diet...