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| Alaska town will likely end up swallowed by the Bering Sea in 2017 |
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 The tiny coastal town of Newtok, Alaska, is on the verge of being swallowed up by the Bering Sea and will likely be completely submerged by 2017, according to the State of Alaska, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the Guardian, which did an detailed news story on the town. The town of Newtok is located about 480 miles west of Anchorage and is home to about 350 people.
Newtok is a growing Yup’ik Eskimo village located on the Yukon-Kuskokwin Delta on the west coast of Alaska, near the confluence of the Newtok and Ninglick Rivers.
What places Newtok in such a perilous position is the Ninglick River, which borders the village on three sides as it flows towards the sea.
Because the river is rapidly eroding and washing away land and buildings as it advances, Newtok’s school could be underwater by 2017, with some houses being flooded even sooner, according to a 2011 relocation report prepared by private and government experts for the State of Alaska and funded by the U.S. Department of the Interior.
The Ninglick River, which is tidally influenced and connects the Baird Inlet to the Bering Sea, has been eroding toward the village at an average pace of 72 feet per year, though one year the rate was up as high as 300 feet.
In 1996, the Newtok River was subsumed into the Ninglick, affecting the village of Newtok dramatically.
Almost overnight, the village became more vulnerable to storm surges and the Ninglick turned from a river into a silt-filled slough, putting a halt to commercial navigation and causing sewage to back up.
According to the report, there is a growing body of evidence indicating that global warming is a contributing factor to the erosion threatening Newtok and other Alaskan communities.
These communities face imminent loss of life, loss of infrastructure, and loss of property, as well as a risk of health epidemics caused by coastal erosion, thawing of permafrost, and flooding, say experts, who also note that climate change could adversely affect some 150 predominantly Alaskan Native communities.
Newtok residents want to be relocated to Mertarvik, a site 9 miles away.
Recommendations submitted in 2011 to the State of Alaska on the question of relocation suggested that an incremental process would be easier, more effective, and less likely to get bogged down in bureaucratic red tape than attempting the wholesale relocation of an entire village.
However, relocating the people of Newtok could cost around $130 million and, so far, efforts in that direction have failed to get off the ground.
One thing is pretty clear: unless government moves quickly to implement the relocation process, Newtok villages will be forced to make a hasty retreat from the sea on their own.
(Source: Science Recorder)
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