ARCTIC SENTINELS
As temperatures rise, life in Alaska is changing. For the members of the US Coast Guard who patrol Alaskan waters, the situation is becoming ever more dangerous. Writer Sébastien Daycard and photographer Laurent Weyl go on patrol to find out more
Having crossed Greenland, the plane flies over Ellesmere Island in northern Canada. Tourists suddenly rush towards the windows. Broken into 1,000 pieces, the ice pack is a magnificent sight. Up ahead, a completely ice-free coast comes into view: Alaska. The pilot announces the temperature – 32°C. We arrive in the city of Kotzebue (also known as Qikiqtaġruk, meaning ‘small island’ in Iñupiatun), where children swim with their lifejackets on. They throw themselves into the Chukchi Sea, diving and heckling. ‘Come and bathe, it’s warm!’ shout Candice and Britney, both enthusiastic about the Hawaiian climate. Their parents watch the teenage girls over the railing of the dock. They also used to bathe here in their own time, but not in a lagoon and not in 22°C water. The Arctic Ocean has never been so badly named.
The Far North is warming at an unprecedented rate and the US Coast Guard is operating on the front line. Present in Alaska since the purchase of the territory from Russia by the US Secretary of State William
Seward in 1867, the Coast Guard is now stationed in the region from summer to autumn each year, a seasonal programme called Operation Arctic Shield.
The operation’s official mission is to ‘protect the nation’s interests, safeguard the environment and strengthen our international, federal, state, local and tribal partnerships.’ Confronted with an increase in maritime traffic, more frequent heat waves and melting permafrost, this mission is becoming ever more challenging.
Most members of the Coast Guard operate on and around the island of Kodiak off southern Alaska, but a dozen people, including mechanics, pilots and divers, occupy a small hangar in Kotzebue in order to provide better response times and coverage to the most remote regions. Their work largely consists of rescuing boats in distress in the Arctic Ocean – an occurrence on the rise since the ice curtain that protected the coast has ceased to exist. ‘With global warming, maritime traffic has increased by 150 per cent in the Bering Strait since 2008,’ says Coast Guard Lieutenant Jeff Mistrick. ‘Cargo ships, tankers and ocean liners are rushing through the Bering Strait to reach or leave the Northwest and Northeast passages, which now link America and Asia to Europe [see box overleaf ]. For us, this creates more risks for which we have to be ready: medical evacuation, shipwrecks or oil spills.’ The Alaskan coast has already had its share of memorable disasters. In 1989, the sinking of the US tanker Exxon Valdez led to the region’s worst ever oil spill. More than 800 kilometres of coastline in the Anchorage area was polluted by 40,000 tons of crude oil. Aboard the helicopter that flies over the Brooks mountain range – which stretches some 700 miles from west to east across northern Alaska into Canada’s Yukon Territory – Coast Guard member Jack Shadwick is the sentinel of a territory so immense it makes all human effort difficult. Huge distances, coupled with the lack of infrastructure, mean that ‘missions to rescue a ship in distress or a sick patient can last a non-stop day with stops to refuel,’ he explains. For Jack, whose dream was to be an action man like Tom Cruise, experience is crucial. ‘We don’t take pilots who are just out of school. The environment is far too hostile. There are no radars, the weather changes very quickly, the forecasts are often wrong, the visibility is low and flying over the mountains, which sometimes reach up to 4,000 metres in the Brooks, can be dangerous.’ Every day presents a new challenge, be it fishing boats running aground in the Bering Sea or yachtsmen on catamarans caught in a storm. ‘We are taught how to survive in case of trouble, how to build a shelter, how to hunt for food, how to make a fire and stay warm until someone comes to get us. Every day is an adventure. This is the last frontier of the United States.’
MORE ACCESSIBLE THAN EVER
The small Coast Guard presence in Kotzebue is the only naval aviation unit in the immediate vicinity of the Bering Strait – the strip of Pacific Ocean that separates Russia and the USA. The rest are located farther south. There are also military bases in the state, but the troops are situated in Kodiak, Fairbanks or Anchorage, either farther south or farther inland. The Kotzebue team is equipped with only one boat capable of operating in the Arctic and, during the week we spend on site,
‘We are taught how to survive in case of trouble, how to build a shelter, hunt for food, how to make a fire and stay warm’
both helicopters break down. There is a wait for spare parts to arrive by Hercules C-130 (a US military transport aircraft) from Kodiak. ‘The paint is new, but the structure remains old,’ Bradley and Jack explain, referring to the helicopters at their disposal. ‘These helicopters are about 30 years old.’
This sparsely resourced presence belies the potential economic importance of the Bering Strait and the wider Arctic region. The Arctic fishery is worth US$3 billion and there’s an estimated reserve of 90 billion barrels of oil beneath the ice, while mineral resources, almost untapped, could be equivalent to $1 trillion. A new economic and military competition for these riches has already begun, although the winners are as yet unclear.
The movement of resources through the region is also increasing. Ten million tonnes of goods transited through the Arctic in 2017, including gas and oil. Forty per cent of this came or went from the port of Shanghai. To convoy these ships, Russia has built 14 additional icebreakers since 2013 and opened six new military bases. But China isn’t to be outdone. The self-proclaimed ‘neighbouring state’ of the Arctic has already carried out six expeditions in the area and built three icebreakers.
All of the players have their eye on the Northwest Passage – the route from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean through a group of sparsely populated Canadian islands, which was first navigated in 1906 by Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen (see box). In summer 2007, the route became entirely ice-free for the first time in recorded history. As the ice continues to thin, it could become a major shortcut for commercial shipping, particularly to and from Asia.
Some commercial vessels are already starting to show up in the passage. ‘I went to Washington a few years ago to talk to the Coast Guard when a cruise ship successfully crossed the Northwest Passage,’ says Lewis Pagel, Kotzebue’s mayor at the time we visited. According to Pagel, however, the Americans are placing
‘I have the impression that the USA is losing this race, just as they are losing others today. A new world is coming’
their hopes elsewhere. ‘They told us they didn’t think the passage would be accessible for a long time, because Canadians are hostile to it, there are icebergs and the route is dangerous. Their plan is to wait for a direct passage through the North Pole to open up. That’s what they’re banking on. They think that the ice pack will totally disappear in 20 years.’
Nevertheless, squabbles could well break out, and considering the speed of ice loss, American views could already be changing. Canada maintains a territorial claim to the Northwest Passage, but in May 2019, at a meeting of the Arctic Council, US secretary of state Mike Pompeo called that claim ‘illegitimate’. At the same meeting, he referred to the Arctic’s melting sea ice as opening ‘new opportunities for trade’.
At the heart of this great game is the US dream of a deep-water port at Kotzebue to reduce the considerable cost of transporting goods. ‘All the studies have been done; all that’s missing is the stamp,’ explains Pagel. ‘But at the moment, we’re facing massive cuts in the federal and Alaskan state budgets. I have the impression that the USA is losing this race, just as they are losing others today. A new world is coming. The Arctic is changing, it will become more accessible than ever before.’
ALL CHANGE
In the years to come, Alaska will have to face many other major challenges. According to Gay Sheffield, a biologist from the University of Fairbanks, ‘the marine ecosystems on either side of the strait, the Pacific and the Arctic are now one and the same. The water is also now warm enough to favour the proliferation of algae that produce a toxin, saxitoxin, that is very difficult to eliminate for molluscs, mammals and sea birds if it is present in too large quantities.’
At the Board of Trade, a saloon in Nome (another town on the west coast farther south than Kotzebue) filled with pool tables and a cabaret complete with corbels and piano, ‘Boogles’ a 40-year-old fisherman, is worried: ‘On 9 March 2019, for the first time in my life, I saw the ice-free ocean in Nome, when ice should be the coldest and thickest. And it was raining! It was also the first time the inhabitants saw walruses on the beach, because the ice had disappeared.’
Diana Hacker, a journalist at the Nome Nugget, has her own opinion on the matter. ‘We now have cod and hake that devour everything, to the point where there is no longer enough food for the seals and birds,’ she says. ‘It’s very hard for the Indigenous people. They’ve been here for 10,000 years, they’ve learned to adapt to everything, to hunt, to fish. And all this traditional knowledge is no longer of any use to them because the rhythm of nature has changed and is now unpredictable.’
According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, since 2010, summer cod have increased more than 20-fold and pollock more than 50fold in the shallow northern Bering Sea, which narrows where Asia and North America reach out towards one another. It’s thought that this is caused by warming