Arctic Town Threatened by Erosion

BARROW, Alaska, Dec. 24, 2008— -- This is a town perched atop the world and on an icy Arctic Ocean, a town whose very existence is being altered by a melting sea most argue Mother Nature never intended.

Barrow is the northernmost town in the United States, and in the winter is connected by the frozen ocean to the North Pole. The only way to and from the town for much of the year is by plane.

Watch the story on "Focus Earth" Saturday Dec. 27 on Discovery's "Planet Green" network.

Alaska Airlines flies in and out twice a day in converted Boeing 737s. The front half of the plane is given over completely to cargo, to allow for traveling Barrow residents to stock up on items that are hard to come by in this remote town, such as toilet paper and soup.

The one grocery store in town is well stocked, but the freight charges to ship everything into town send prices through the roof. A gallon of milk will set you back $10 and almost certainly arrives in the store on its expiration date.

These airplanes are so full of cargo that it takes airline employees almost two hours to empty the hold and get the items into the terminal. That's fine when October brings balmy temperatures that hover around zero, but in January when the mercury falls well below that, things can get tricky.

Not everyone in town depends on the Nabiscos and Krafts of the world for their food, however. Nearly two-thirds of Barrow's citizens are Inupiaq, an Eskimo tribe that has subsisted off the land and sea for generations, hunting and fishing to survive instead of driving to the market. But now, their way of life is at risk because of the warming of the planet.

The ocean that used to be frozen solid by mid-October now stays largely liquid until December or January. Erosion is chewing away at Barrow's borders, so much so that some in town imagine a day, not too far away, when they'll have to move the town further inland.

An Inupiaq elder named George Edwards, though, assured ABC News that he and his people would be just fine.

"We're ocean people, we'll stay on the ocean," he said. "We'll keep walking back."

It's not just the physical town that faces the dangers of a melting and encroaching ocean. Whaling, the chief industry here, is also in peril. The Inupiaq depend on the practice to survive Barrow's harsh winters.

"If half of your meal is not the whale, then you'll have chapped lips all the time and your skin will dry up," Edwards said. "The air [here] has no moisture in it because it already has frozen and dropped and when you live in the Arctic you cannot stay very long in the cold unless your body can generate the fat that can counteract the cold. ... As a human being, we don't have the ability to make this fat like this, so we have to borrow it from the animal."