Charles Alexie and Gerald Tom near visible coastal erosion that encroaches on Newtok village in Alaska, on 16 August 2024. Erosion and melting permafrost have largely destroyed Newtok, eating about 70 feet (21.34 meters) of land every year. Photo: Rick Bowmer / AP

Climate change destroyed an Alaska village. Its residents are starting over in a new town – “Alaska Native economic, social, and cultural ways of being, which have served so well for millennia, are now under extreme threat due to accelerated environmental change”

By Rick Bowmer and Mark Thiessen 28 September 2024 MERTARVIK, Alaska (AP) – Growing up along the banks of the Ninglick River in western Alaska, Ashley Tom would look out of her window after strong storms from the Bering Sea hit her village and notice something unsettling: the riverbank was creeping ever closer. It was […]

Map showing geomorphological data and icefield reconstruction of the Juneau Icefield for the “Little Ice Age” (LIA) maximum. Graphic: Davies, et al., 2024 / Nature Communications

Melting of Alaska’s Juneau Icefield accelerates, losing snow nearly 5 times faster than in the 1980s – “When you go there the changes from year-to-year are so dramatic that it just hits you over the head”

By Seth Borenstein 2 July 2024 (AP) – The melting of Alaska’s Juneau icefield, home to more than 1,000 glaciers, is accelerating. The snow covered area is now shrinking 4.6 times faster than it was in the 1980s, according to a new study. Researchers meticulously tracked snow levels in the nearly 1,500-square mile icy expanse going back […]

Map of the U.S. showing 11 weather and climate disasters each costing $1 billion or more that occurred between January and May, 2024. Graphic: NOAA / NCEI

Billion-dollar disasters swept across the U.S. in Spring 2024

By Meredith Garofalo 13 June 2024 (Space.com) – Two severe weather events in May brought the number of billion-dollar disasters for the United States in 2024 up to nearly a dozen.  The month began with a tornado outbreak from May 6 to May 10 that stretched across 23 states, going from South Dakota to Florida. […]

Maps showing daily temperature variation (DTV, a) and population density in the world (b). Graphic: Liu and Smith-Greenaway, 2024 / PNAS Nexus

Study finds Black and Hispanic Americans are disproportionately exposed to wider temperature swings

22 May 2024 (PNAS Nexus) – Extreme heat can harm human health, but so can extreme temperature swings. Large daily temperature variation (DTV) has been associated with elevated mortality in studies around the world. Trees and other vegetation can lower DTV, as trees reduce temperature through transpiration during the day and also trap long-wave radiation […]

Tukpahlearik Creek in northwestern Alaska’s Brooks Range runs bright orange where permafrost is thawing. Photo: Taylor Roades / Scientific American

Why are Alaska’s rivers turning orange? “It was a famous, pristine river ecosystem, and it feels like it’s completely collapsing now”

By Alec Luhn 24 December 2023 (Scientific American) – It was a cloudy July afternoon in Alaska’s Kobuk Valley National Park, part of the biggest stretch of protected wilderness in the U.S. We were 95 kilometers (60 miles) from the nearest village and 400 kilometers from the road system. Nature doesn’t get any more unspoiled. […]

Regional glacier mass change and contributions to sea level rise from 2015 to 2100. Discs show global and regional projections of glacier mass remaining by 2100 relative to 2015 for global mean temperature change scenarios. Discs are scaled based on each region’s contribution to global mean sea level rise from 2015 to 2100 for the +2°C scenario by 2100 relative to preindustrial levels, and nested rings are colored by temperature change scenarios showing normalized mass remaining in 2100. Regional sea level rise contributions >1 mm SLE for the +2°C scenario are printed in the center of each disc. The horizontal bars below each disc show time series of area-averaged annual mass balance from 2015 to 2100 for +1.5°C (top bar) and +3°C (bottom bar) scenarios. The colorbar is saturated at −2.5 m w.e., but minimum annual values reach −4.2 m w.e. in Scandinavia. Graphic: Rounce, et al., 2022 / Science

Half of glaciers will be gone by 2100 even under Paris 1.5C accord, study finds

By Phoebe Weston 5 January 2023 (The Guardian) – Half the planet’s glaciers will have melted by 2100 even if humanity sticks to goals set out in the Paris climate agreement, according to research that finds the scale and impacts of glacial loss are greater than previously thought. At least half of that loss will happen […]

Maasai children stand beside a zebra that local residents say died due to drought, as they graze their cattle at Ilangeruani village, near Lake Magadi, in Kenya, on 9 November 2022. Photo: Brian Inganga / AP Photo

In 2022, AP photographers captured pain of a changing planet

By Peter Prengaman 16 December 2022 (AP) – In 2022, Associated Press photographers captured signs of a planet in distress as climate change reshaped many lives. That distress was seen in the scarred landscapes in places where the rains failed to come. It was felt in walloping storms, land-engulfing floods, suffocating heat and wildfires no […]

Map showing GFS 2m Temperature Anomaly for 20 December 2022. Much of the Arctic in December 2022 experienced a burst of freak warming. Graphic: Climate Reanalyzer

December 2022 serving up baked Alaska and warming most of Arctic – “Record-setting weather like we’re seeing plenty of examples of in recent years does tell a real story of climate heating”

By Seth Borenstein 5 December 2022 (AP) – Much of the Arctic is in a burst of freak December warming. In Utqiagvik, Alaska’s northernmost community formerly known as Barrow, it hit 40 degrees (4.4 degrees Celsius) Monday morning. That’s not only a record by six degrees (3.3 degrees Celsius) but it’s the warmest that region has seen […]

Arctic annual air surface temperatures from October 2021 to September 2022 were the sixth warmest dating back to 1900. The image on the left depicts the departure from the average near-surface temperature across the Arctic during this period, with redder colors showing areas of greater than average warmth. The graphic on the right shows how the rate of Arctic air temperature warming has outpaced the rate of global warming. Data: ERA5 and NASA. Graphic: NOAA / Climate.gov

NOAA: Human-caused climate change fuels warmer, wetter, stormier Arctic

13 December 2022 (NOAA) – A typhoon, smoke from wildfires, and increasing rain are not what most imagine when thinking of the Arctic. Yet these are some of the climate-driven events included in NOAA’s 2022 Arctic Report Card, which provides a detailed picture of how warming is reshaping the once reliably frozen, snow-covered region which […]

Landsat images from 21 February 2000 (left) and 27 July 2019 (right) illustrating glacier retreat on top of Mount Kilimanjaro (United Republic of Tanzania). Photo: U.S. Geological Survey

Kilimanjaro’s and Africa’s last glaciers to go by 2050, says UN – “What is quite unprecedented in the historical record is how quickly this is happening”

By Patrick Hughes 3 November 2022 (BBC News) – Glaciers across the globe – including the last ones in Africa – will be unavoidably lost by 2050 due to climate change, the UN says in a report [UNESCO finds that some iconic World Heritage glaciers will disappear by 2050 –Des]. Glaciers in a third of […]

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