Not sure exactly what caused this sort of bizarre sieve deposit along Turnagain Arm.

It’s silt, really. Pieces of mountains, ground down by the Cook Inlet glacier during the last ice age, and by the smaller glaciers that surround it now — washed up and down Cook Inlet with every tide. Along the Kenai Peninsula, it flows down from the layered bluffs in grey-brown trickles, fanning out into wet shiny patches that Katmai calls “cold lava.” Rounding the corner at Point Possession, the silt takes over the world.

It took over our gear. I pulled a grape sized chunk of compacted silt out of my shoe, which had gained half again its weight in clay-like paste. Both shoes finally burst out the sides, as the silt squeezed out all the space for my feet. Each time I blew up the sleeping pads, I could feel the grit between my teeth. It formed a fine gray dust that rained out of everything we owned — pouring from every drybag, shaking from every piece of clothing. It mixed with the layers of sunblock to form a dark grey makeup that eventually took fifteen minutes of scrubbing to remove from my face. Even now, after several days in Anchorage, I find little pockets of Turnagain buried deep within our stuff.

In Chikaloon Bay there was no beach, just mud flats extending up into marsh. We landed here, on mud-coated ice.

At high tide in Chickaloon Bay, the silt was so close we could hit it with our paddles — far from any visible shore. At low tide in Chickaloon Bay we wove through an endless maze of dunes and mudflats, first on foot, then in the rafts, as the rising tide turned dips into streams, rapidly erasing square miles of land. The silt followed us into Turnagain, where we leapt on it like a trampoline to demonstrate the liquefaction. Then skirted the cliffs on a thin edge of slippery mud to avoid the worst of the liquefaction.

An initially firm beach acquired a water-bed like consistency when we spent some time jumping up and down on it.

Liquefaction is quicksand. It’s quickly deposited silt, filling up a channel in the course of a tide, so unstable that it will turn to leg-sucking goo with a footstep. Someone died in it once, decades ago. Others have been rescued. It’s more easily avoided than many people realize, by staying on the high and dry edges. It’s more easily escaped than many people realize also, by floating your legs out rather than working them deeper in. We carried packrafts — inflated — which makes getting out of liquefied silt into a task as simple as leaning on the boat.

The tide carries us quickly into Turnagain Arm

Forbidden Waters

But, like many aspects of the wilderness, liquifying silt takes thought to deal with safely. So do tidal currents. And the presence of both things is what turns Turnagain Arm into a strange sort of no-man’s land — a trivial distance from hundreds of thousands of Anchorage residents, but almost never visited. It’s surrounded by more widely-accepted risks: A busy and deadly highway, avalanche-prone ski terrain, boat-flipping whitewater, bear-dense trails… Surfers visit Turnagain when the big bores come. But in the whole time we were there, we saw only one boat other than our two packrafts (and our friend Erik’s, when he was visiting us). So we had the tides to ourselves, riding up and down Turnagain on a conveyor belt that could move us up to five miles an hour.

Urban

Not the most scenic route, but we stuck to our plan to continue our human-powered route through the city.

That conveyor belt brought us to the Turnagain Arm trail, which brought us to Anchorage. In Kenai we were urban as well, but the experience there was one of beach-based couchsurfing, where each day we’d walk and paddle a few miles of shoreline, then scramble up the bluffs to someone’s house. We knew the highway was out there, but we never saw it. In Anchorage, on the other hand, our path has taken us right through the center of town. Sometimes on bike paths, and sometimes on sidewalks right beside streets roaring with four lanes of traffic, several cars zipping past us every second of our walk. And I guess I’m more countrified than I thought, because I simply cannot imagine where so many many people have to be so very very quickly all the time.

Rules

We didn’t have to walk through Anchorage. That was simply our own arbitrary rule. Traveling is often full of rules: The speed limits and traffic signs on a highway. The tickets and lines and security restrictions at an airport. The schedules and fares on a boat…

Fine mud streaked by tidal currents covers gravel.

On an expedition, we get to make our own rules. Sometimes we don’t. We’ve done trips that include hitching rides on trucks, four-wheelers and skiffs. When we walked from Seattle to the Aleutian Islands, we made ourselves a rule so strict that we could not enter any form of motorized transportation for an entire year. This time, we’re keeping our steps together — creating a continuous human-powered line around Cook Inlet. We allow ourselves to jump away from that line, as long as we return to it again leaving no gap. Often we’ve caught a ride to visit someone off the path, then rode back to where we left it.

Why have rules? This is not a race, and there is no one keeping record books. But the rules are the boundaries that shape the experience. Keeping a continuous line stops us from skipping over the things that seem hard (like the mudflats of Chickaloon Bay), and the things that seem worthlessly easy (like the strip malls of Anchorage). If I wanted to go backpacking for a few days, I’d never choose either of those places. But the trip is richer for seeing both of them. Jumping away from the line adds something too — the only way to visit people more than a mile or two out of the way, with a kid for whom a mile or two is still a big part of the day (he can walk up to 7.5 miles per day, if it’s easy terrain and he’s in the mood).

What’s Next?

In the very short term, we’ll be in Anchorage until Tuesday, when you can catch us on Talk of Alaska.

Then we paddle across Knik Arm, where we turn a geographical corner that separates two very different halves of the trip. The mudflats will continue. The highways and cities will not. I hope the snow won’t either.

Finally, a few photos taken over the past month…

We followed the tracks of this coyote through Turnagain mud for some time.

The AWCC is a major tourist destination, and also deeply involved in restoring wood bison to Alaska.

The eastern edge of Chickaloon Bay

Travis has read Erin’s book. He was working on his transmission when we walked by, and recognized us – the packraft paraphernalia plus kids were the giveaway I think. He walked with us for a little while in south Anchorage.

A stream swoolen by spring melt flows over winter’s ice at sunset.

Hig stands on top of a giant erratic boulder.

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Large shelves of ice extend out from he shoreline in places, providing a barrier to erosion until they melt in the spring.

Mud flows down the beach the day after rain.

There were four wheeler tracks and truck tracks, their parallel lines nearly ubiquitous where the tide hadn’t washed them away. There were houses. Occasional cabins at creek mouths. Small clusters of boarded-up summer homes in the rare places where the bluffs stepped away from the beach. Roof peaks and windows just visible over the top of the bluffs. Setnetting cabins, clinging to the narrow stripe between the tides and the crumbling cliffs.

But it was nearly empty of people–from the time we left Homer to a few miles shy of the Kasilof River. We saw a handful of four wheelers. A pair of construction workers running a backhoe at the end of the Anchor point road. One boat, slowly trolling by between us and the volcanoes.

A poultry farm perched precariously atop eroding bluffs provided an exciting diversion for the kids.

When 60 feet of land between it and the ocean vanished into storm waves, this house remained, at the edge of a 100 foot drop.

And the highway. Many times it was less than a quarter mile away. On one calm day, we paddled in the smooth brown water, listening to the low hum of the oil rig, its loudspeakers reaching us with an occasional unintelligble bark. From the other direction, we could hear the periodic growls of cars zooming by on the bluff top highway, watching trucks and semis through a small gap in the trees.

That road is the usual connection between Homer and Anchorage, and on it’s familiar curves, I never thought of the coastline below me, other than as a gap that opened the view to the volcanoes on the other side. Our parallel world wasn’t wilderness. And as we began to approach the urban swath of Kenai, we’ve slept on more indoor floors than sandy beaches. But traveling through at 7 miles a day, holding our walking conversation, I have a sense of this place that you can never get at highway speed.

Cheesy noodles are a standard for us, and the kids love them.

Given a tight timeline for borrowing a car, we shopped for over 100 lbs of food in under an hour.

Eating Gravel (or sand. or silt)

It was best not to look at the brownish green color of the grits on the spoon. Without the visuals, they tasted just fine. April 23rd was one of our first rainy days of the trip, turning the already muddy bluffs streams into a soup as brown as Cook Inlet itself, in a place with no clean snow to melt for water.

Most of the time, we avoid cooking our food in mud. We generally get the kids to add the sand and gravel afterwards. Hig and I dive to protect the pot, the bowl, or the ziploc–in futile defense of our food from the latest game of sand kicking.

Generous hosts along the trail add some diversity to our diet.

So what do we eat besides the local geology? Things that don’t have water in them. It’s a simple answer that makes most people jump to thoughts of freeze dried prepackaged meals. Which we never eat. Instead, I snake through nearly any grocery store, however small, tallying up pounds of food as I throw things in my cart. For our family, it’s a little over four pounds a day.

For meals we cook, it’s things like spaghetti, cornmeal, oatmeal, instant potatoes or minute rice–dressed up when we cook them with dried veggies we bulk order and send to ourselves along the way, a couple of spices, and a generous helping of butter, coconut oil or cheese. Sometimes it’s popcorn. For things we snack on, I try to strike a balance between stuff I can easily buy that’s appealing to the kids and my desire to avoid long lists of chemical sounding ingredients. But calories themselves–those are a plus. So we eat things like potato chips stomped down to fit in the pack, nuts, dried fruit, crackers, pretzels, granola bars, cheese, chocolate, and cookies. Lituya’s favorites are potato chips and chocolate. Katmai will eat granola bars all day long. Hig and I are rather partial to the potato chips ourselves, but mostly start off eating things that take up the most space, and finish up eating things that the kids didn’t like as much.

Coal outcrops along the shore were deemed “running rocks” by Katmai.

The One Month Boundary

What makes a backpacking trip into an expedition–a journey? Remoteness of terrain, harshness of weather, uniqueness of route, record-setting feats of athletics or skill? Our journeys often have a few pieces of those. (I look forward someday to traveling in a month that turns out to be warmer than average). Never all of them. But in our experience, the most important thing is time. Time enough not just to forget the everyday worries and schedules of a settled existence, but for the journey to become life itself.

Erosion control structures on Kalifornsky Beach, each one a little different than the last.

In over a dozen years of trekking, we’ve done trips of every length and size. At two weeks we get a taste of that feeling. But it’s a month that really makes a journey. We crossed that line a couple days ago. I can look at the tiny map of the whole trip we carry on a business card, using my finger to trace the line we’ve walked. Even at 4-year-old speed, we’ve come a long way from Dogfish Bay to Kenai. And looking ahead, we have so much farther to go (around 3 more months to Cape Douglas). It feels overwhelming, exciting, and strangely–inevitable. As if this moving life we’ve settled into will inexorably carry us forward–hundreds and hundreds of miles until we decide to cut it off again.

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Wind-driven cold snow coats a tide flat on Kachemak Bay.

We wore everything. Every layer of clothing for every member of the family, a smear of frozen sunblock on noses and cheeks against the bright sun that traveled with the frigid wind. Even an extra pair of sleeping pads strapped over the trying-to-nap Lituya on my back. So when I stepped into the door of our resupply point at Kachemak Bay Wilderness Lodge, I started stripping layers off me and the kids, grateful and appreciative for the chance to stand in a warm space. And then I looked at the shelf beside me — and saw celery and broccoli.

And then I realized that I was standing in their refrigerator.

And that was only the beginning.

Two days later, both kids shuffle-ran through a half inch of powder over old icy ski tracks on one of the Kachemak Bay state park trails.

Piles of moose droppings like this proved very fascinating to Katmai and Lituya.

Lituya: “Is that moose poop? Is it cold? Can I step over the moose poop?”

Katmai: “It’s the coldest Ice Age of the Pleistocene! I am a wooly mammoth! Watch me use my tusks to dig for plants under the snow!”

Katmai’s favorite game to enact is “Evolution from First Life to Neanderthals.” So we travel regularly with Cambrian trilobites, Carboniferous bugs, Permian reptiles, Cretaceous dinosaurs, and Eocene mammals… But this time, we were stuck in the Pleistocene, when recurring ice ages set the tone.

Katmai and Lituya hang out in a gravel-filled half-boat heated by our little Titanium Goat stove.

I had envisioned weather that would prevent the launching and paddling of packrafts. I hadn’t envisioned weather that would drive us away from the beach entirely, where temperatures in the teens combined with a steady scream of wind (or was that the scream of the kids?) into an icy blast that sent us scurrying for the protection of the trees almost as soon as we started. So long as we walked only downwind, our mammoth took the blizzard in stride. Our smaller mammoth enjoyed the inland trails. Then we ran out of those, made our way around a few more protected shorelines and one tantrum-inducing point, before squishing the tent into a thicket of trees, wondering about the theoretical existence of spring, and dining on nutritional yeast and jalepeno soup. (We saved all the regular food for the kids, in anticipation of more blizzard to come). We sketched out plans for stretching our remaining food to cover days of hunkering in the tent, or creeping along as wind and cold limited our options.

We packrafted through ice to reach the north side of Kachemak Bay.

But after two days the air stilled, leaving behind a glassy calm Kachemak Bay, and a path (between slushy small ice floes with resting seals) to Kachemak Selo and Vosnesenska.

That’s the deal with any long journey. You get every weather there is.

A Walking Conversation

The air warmed between there and Homer, where the yellow grass and dusty streets are filled with a pervasive odor of thawing dog droppings, prompting me to check the bottom of my shoes a rather unreasonable number of times.

Our journey has barely begun, but Homer is the 6th community, and 8th inhabited place we’ve visited. And along with all the other heavy and awkward things we’re carrying with us, we’ve been carrying our question — about the future of the region and the future of Alaska. We’ve heard worries about growing communities, and worries about shrinking ones. Stories of decline — in fish, in birds, and in other natural systems. Worries that shifting baselines mean that each subsequent generation will never know what has already been lost. And some hopes too. In adaptability and resilience, in how much easier it is to learn things in our information age. Hope is a theme that keeps cropping up: How do people find and maintain hope for the future in the midst of what they see is going wrong?

We’ll be walking from Homer today – Tuesday the 16th, and you could join us. We’re planning to depart Bishop’s Beach at 4:00. We’re pretty slow, so it’s easy to catch up if you can’t start until later!

Selected photos

See a larger selection of photos here

An iconic brand in Alaska, Extra Tuffs are durable rubber boots – not the sort of thing we usually trek in. But with slow walking on wet beaches in cold weather, it’s been pretty nice.

A small sea cave provided protection from the wind for a fire.

A wintry day on the coast.

Seldovians join us to walk the coast out of town.

Lituya climbs over a rocky point.

The hard parts of a sea star, gradually disarticulating on the beach.

A striped chiton shell among other less striking debris.

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walking down the icy dock for our 4:30AM departure

Beginning

4:00 AM. 9 degrees Farenheit. I lifted the sleeping kids out of their beds, already dressed in their outside gear, to walk down the squeaky snow of our driveway, under a full moon. Out of the streaky galley window, the glimpse of white on the crests of each wave wasn’t enough to stave off seasickness — for me or the kids. I passed the few hours trying to sleep, stretched out on the bench beneath one of Hig’s dad’s carvings. This was the fishing boat he’d worked for years when Hig was a child, going to fish cod the way it had for years. Scrambling over the icy rails into our packrafts was awkward, but doable, and we paddled to the shore of Dogfish Bay in a frigid, brightening dawn.

Ice falls graced the cliffs of Dogfish Bay

Human Scale

Our world now was Katmai, running and leaping and climbing over the boulders in his new neoprene boots. It was Lituya, still sleepy, riding on my back draped in all our extra insulation. It was a curious coyote, pausing to watch our lunch stop. It was mountain goats grazing on headlands, above spires of rock spread thickly with a frosting of rough salt ice from the recent storm. It was a packed full day that encompassed, in total, less than one percent of the journey we have planned.

Katmai clambering boulders at the tip of the Kenai Peninsula

My lists of logistics jumped from town to town, resupply spot to resupply spot, as if we might simply step from one to another: Nanwalek, Port Graham, Seldovia, China Poot, Vosnesenska, Homer… Williamsport, Douglas River, Sukoi Bay. Which things go in which box? Who do we talk to in this town or that? Where do we send the bear fence, the summer tent? How much food from A to B?
To prepare, I must tackle the whole of that 800 miles, every day of that 4 months, holding it all in my head. On the shore of Dogfish Bay, all of that fell away. The inlet seemed so vast, and the trip suddenly so much bigger than I’d imagined. At the same time, it seemed so small, and so simple — nothing more than the boulder before my feet.

The kids look out at the ocean on one of our many climbs over headlands between Dogfish Bay and Nanwalek.

Frustration and Enthusiasm

“Why do we never do anything easy?” Hig asked, trying to drive wooden stakes into the icy forest floor, in the spot we’d retreated to after abandoning a steep and icy traverse made extra-slippery by a dusting of powder snow.

Katmai runs ahead with great enthusiasm, at the beginning of our journey around Cook Inlet

Katmai expressed his frustration by asking when the tent would be up, over and over again in a whining voice. Lituya cried as she struggled to understand the new routine. Hig was right. Even this first tiny step — following the exposed and complicated coast on the tip of the Kenai Peninsula in late March with two toddlers — wasn’t easy. There was already gear broken, stuff we realized we should have done differently, and a list of things to swap out, repair, or replace in Seldovia.

Looking down at our tent on Johnson Creek Beach

But that was just the first night. By the second, Lituya had stopped asking to go back to the van, and started asking about our “tent home,” when she wasn’t asking to walk the beach or climb the rocks herself. Katmai was as pumped up from the lead up to this journey as we were, and literally hit the ground running (at least when we could convince him to pretend to be a fast 2-footed prehistoric creature, rather than a slower 4-footed one). There have been difficult scrambles over headlands and boulders, sleet squalls, and cold nights. And there have been amazing scrambles over headlands and boulders, between twisted trees and pools filled with anemones. There have been sunny afternoons hunting fossils on the beach and eating popcorn popped over the fire. We’re getting back into the swing of an alternate way of life. We do a major expedition every year and a half or so. Even our two year old has done this before.

Nanwalek store and Mount Bede

Neighbors

“She looks just like her grandma,” Mary said in Port Graham, looking at Lituya as she devoured a pile of grilled salmon bellies.

Dede spent years working with Port Graham and Nanwalek as part of the alcoholism prevention program, and it seemed that everyone we ran into in either village remembered her fondly. For all the time I’ve spent in Seldovia over the years, and all the time I’ve spent walking into villages around the state, I’d never been to either of the two villages that are our closest neighbors. The connections are there, though. We talked to people who remembered when Hig had walked there as a child with a group of local kids. A man who showed us old family photos as his brother fed us bidarkis, including pictures of our next-door neighbors in Seldovia.

Oil rig parked in Port Graham for the winter

Our children ran and played with the local kids and opened gifts of easter toys. We talked with their parents, about the aging and shrinking Port Graham, and the young and growing Nanwalek — and what might happen when a road and a shared airport bridged the four miles between them.

coralline algae in a tidepool near Nanwalek

Not-home

We are home now, and I am typing this from my yurt in Seldovia. And we are not home, still just barely beginning an expedition, camped on the beach, and not even bringing our kids back to their own toys or beds. Headed off again Thursday afternoon, after a potluck bonfire tonight.

Katmai points out a snail fossil on 4th of July Creek Beach

Lituya riding a “wood Apatosaurus”

Katmai’s shot: his own upside down face

Katmai’s shot: looking out from the trees

The Laura S. steams away after dropping us in Dogfish Bay, headed out for cod.

Katmai moves through the obstacles in the forest

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As Hig and Erin begin their 4-month long trip around Cook Inlet they asked me to write a blog post on “Who is Ground Truth Trekking?”.

Hig, Erin, David and Andrew before GTT was a gleam in Hig and Erin’s eyes (2004)

To start I thought I’d just briefly describe the history of the organization as I understand it. Starting way back in 2004 or so Erin and Hig became interested in the Pebble Mine prospect, and planned a couple of trips to the area to “see what it was actually like”. These trips, and particularly their photos, turned out to be very popular and were posted on their “Alaska Trekking” page. In 2007, not long before starting off on their epic “Journey on the Wild Coast” they created a non-profit entity called “Ground Truth Trekking (GTT)”. The general idea was to merge their adventure travel with their interest in natural resources issues in Alaska and to provide a vehicle for raising awareness of those issues. At that time they were the Board of Directors and the sole members of the organization. Erin blogged about the origins of the organization in 2009, just after I came on board to help with coal-related research.

Fast forward to today and Ground Truth Trekking has grown enough that we have to file the “long” IRS form for non-profits and have actual Board of Directors meetings (though only over Google Hangouts, no suits required!). In addition to our extensive website we have supported various treks, provide technical and scientific advice to a number of organizations, conduct public outreach, produce reports on natural resource issues etc. All of this is made possible through grants, sponsors, book/DVD sales, and of course donations. We’ve also been greatly helped along the way by a number of volunteers.

So who is Ground Truth Trekking?

Board of Directors:

Bretwood “Hig” Higman, PhD (Specialties: Management, Figures, Seismic Hazards)
Erin McKittrick, M.S. (Specialties: Media Relations, Books, Climate Change)
David Coil, PhD (Specialties: Content Creation, Coal and Metals Mining)
Andrew Mattox, (Specialties: Economics, Business, Finances, Geology)

Programmers/Website Development

Michael Kirk
Sam Vevang
Damien Tougas

Copyeditors

Liz Lester, PhD
Niki Hoagland
Elisa Mader

Accounting/Finances

Amy Gilson

Other Contributors

Bjorn Olson (jack of all-trades; filmmaker, contractor, website work, content creation, etc.)
Mike Borden, M.S. (field assistant, photo expeditions)
Valisa Higman (graphic arts)
Chelsea Suydam (maps)

(Read more about most of these folks on our “GTT Team” page)

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800 miles of coast – Preschooler speed

Cook Inlet

A hundred and seventy million years ago, sea-monster-like plesiosaurs swam between volcanoes. Lava flows poured into the warm sea, buried by mud and the carcasses of algae. As these volcanoes became part of Alaska, new mountains rose, flanked by a plain of winding rivers and lush swamps. The forces that thrust up the mountains also pulled the land down, burying the algae and plants, forming oil and coal.

Long after the plesiosaurs had disappeared, salmon evolved, swimming up those winding rivers. Ice rolled across the land, filling the lows between volcanoes and jagged peaks, pushing the living world far out beyond the current edge of the ocean. Ice pulsed in cycles; retreating, advancing, retreating… Caribou followed the tundra that replaced the ice. Moose followed the willow that replaced the tundra. Rising oceans filled Cook Inlet, mingling with waters still murky from the flow of glacial rivers.

As they had countless times before, the salmon returned to the new-again rivers. This time people followed them, the only true newcomers to this land. Thousands of years later, new faces and new technologies followed those first people, seeking trade routes, then otter pelts, gold, and oil.

Sunset over Cook Inlet

People transformed this land. There were motors. Roads, drill rigs, ships, airplanes, telephones, and computers. Beetle-killed forests, disappearing halibut and king salmon, abandoned industries and settlements, tourist towns rising, glaciers melting. Otters returning.

Still, there are rocks, mud, ice, fish, bears, and people.

This is Cook Inlet’s past and present. What of the future?

What is the future of Alaska? Not the one or five or ten years that we often tend to think in — driven by current power structures, politics, and leaders. But the future of 50 or 100 years from now, and beyond.

We’re walking around Cook Inlet (beginning in less than a week), to see both the wild areas and the human ones, and to hear the stories and dreams of people who live along the way.

And this is what we want to ask: What do you think the future holds? For our economy, communities, lifestyles, wildlife, landscape, and ocean?

How You can Contribute

Talk to us: We’d love to hear your ideas in the comments, and for anyone who lives on Cook Inlet – in person as well.

Walk with us: We’re also hoping to have people join us when we’re on beaches near towns for a walking conversation, or just to say hi (a 4-year-old’s pace is quite relaxed so we’ll be easy to catch/keep up with).

Jackup rig in Kachemak Bay…

Read More: on our Tracing the Heart of Alaska page

Get in touch: by email (hig314@gmail.com), FB, or call 399-5530 (we’ll answer/check messages when we happen to be in a community). For info when we’re between towns and out of touch, contact Hig’s sister (valisamay@gmail.com or 541-520-7331). See our rough schedule below for an expected itinerary.

(This is a rough guide, not an exhaustive list. We’re also excited to visit folks in the places in between these, and we’ll try to update the time frame as things get firmed up)
Schedule
Start: 3/27
Nanwalek: 3/29
Port Graham: 3/30
Seldovia: 4/2
Vosnesenska: 4/9
Homer:4/12
Ninilchik: 4/19
Kasilof: 4/24
Kenai: 4/28
Nikiski: 5/1
Hope: 5/10
Girdwood: 5/11
Anchorage: 5/22
Tyonek: 6/4

Cook Inlet tidepooling

Tuxedni Bay: 6/20
Chinitna Bay: 6/29
Williamsport: 7/6
McNeil Bay: 7/15
Sukoi Bay: 7/24

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Kids in the woods

In honor of Katmai’s fourth birthday (today), Lituya’s second (last month), and my fourth year as a wilderness parent.
(Read First Year in the Woods, Second Year in the Woods, and Third Year in the Woods).

Passing on an Obsession

Katmai: “I want to hike all the way to Graduation Peak! I want to go farther than Graduation Peak.”
“When can we hike to the top of the mountain with the Sounding Board?”
“I want to walk the whole way to town!”

These are the plans our son makes all the time — with a mixture of plaintive whining and enthusiastic determination. These are our everyday outings: Striding up the steep and slippery trail behind our yurt, always failing to reach the snowy summit of Graduation Peak, an icy 3,000 feet and six miles away. Always starting out again with same charmingly unrealistic ambitions. Always having fun along the way.

Failing to scale the mountain, he scaled this log instead

Up in the skinny branches as they whip in the wind

The whole way to town is only three miles; downhill from home, uphill returning. This he really does do, anytime we’re willing to take him, gleefully skittering over ice or plowing through deep snow in the clearcut, then adamantly refusing every proffered ride on the road.

“Are we getting close, mom?”

“No, it’s still a quite a ways farther to home.”

“That’s OK. We’re always getting closer and closer if we’re walking!”

Sometimes he surprises me with a downhill dash, or while mimicking a particularly speedy dinosaur. But at barely over three feet tall, small for his age in clunking boots and winter clothes, Katmai’s usual pace reminds me more of the awkwardly crawling prehistoric fish he often pretends to be. But he goes. And goes. And goes. And goes.

Good. We have big plans for him. I may be his doting mother, but I am also his ruthless trainer — grooming him to keep up with mom and dad, beaming with overdone pride at each glimmer of adventurous ambition.

There are always toys in the wilderness.

He falls, and claims it was on purpose. He happily postholes through waist deep snow. Sleet, cold, and rain barely phase him. Wet feet don’t either. He handled last September’s storm-battered visit to Grewingk Glacier with more grace and aplomb than most of the film crew professionals we were traveling with.

He’s four. Setting off for a 30 minute jaunt without a bag of snacks can spell disaster. Someone else walking in front of him when he wanted to “lead the way” can spark a tearful tantrum.

But overall, he amazes me. After carrying him for hundreds of miles, and coaxing him — agonizingly — for dozens, I’m left to step back and wonder. How did we get to this? Nature? Nurture? Watching him in the woods, I can see pieces of my own stubbornness, perseverence, and caution — and pieces of his dad’s unruffled stoicism at any physical discomfort. I can also see the ease borne of days, weeks, and months in the wilderness — more time in his four short years than many adults get in a lifetime.

Toddling Ice

Lituya in sock mittens

After much effort, Lituya beams on top of the stump she climbed

Lituya, on the other hand, just turned two. An age of exploding language, reasoning, imagination, and physical skills. And of falling flat in the snow.

Her stamina for moving forward in a given direction is barely a few hundred yards at a stretch. Her mittens must come on and off at five minute intervals. Napping gets harder, and not napping is worse. After a slip, she flails on her back in the puffy awkwardness of snowpants and coat, a plump blue cherub with an angry red face.

She can love the snow. Packing wet globs on a snowman or sledding down the hill… Until all of a sudden she doesn’t, with only seconds marking the line between giggling fun and screeching frustration. For longer stretches, she can enjoy riding on my back. Except when she doesn’t. But with a second child, each difficult phase feels far less permanent. Within a year, she may love the winter woods as much as the summer.

I want to believe that any kid can.

Future Ground Truth Trekkers

Seldovia’s future Ground Truth Trekkers enjoy lunch on a frozen lake

Katmai and Noah explore a sandstone cave.

Which is why, every Friday, we find ourselves with a handful of other adults and several handfuls of zero to six year old children, herding cats in the snow. I mean herding kids in the snow. Or on the ice. Or on the beach.

It used to be a weekly ritual for just my family, transformed into an official community event that happens even when we’re gone. The structure is minimal. Meet at 11AM, at a location Hig and I pick out a couple days before based on weather, snow conditions, and tides.

Sometimes we have 10 people. Sometimes 20. The kids stop for snacks and snow angels. They lose track of our goal to climb and slide and roll on the hills, and to lose their boots (often) in snowdrifts. We go one or two miles. Often, some of the kids turn back halfway. But all of them go further than they thought they could. And as we see some of the kids come out over and over again, I watch even the most reluctant hikers begin to transform into kids that love the outdoors.

Why Bring Kids Into The Woods?

One family, one pot

Because they might scream and whine for half an hour while you struggle to set up camp and start the fire? Because they might sleep on your lap for an hour while you perch on a seat of knobby rocks, looking out to sea and slowly succumbing to the chill of the frozen morning? Or because they might gleefully hunt for anemones by headlamp in the darkness of a low-tide snowstorm? Crow with delight as the packraft slips into a cave hung with icicles? (All of this happened on Sunday night’s camp-out)

Bringing them into the woods is a lot of work.

Selfishly, I do it because I love both my kids and the wilderness, and refuse to give up one for the other. Visiting a city last fall, I enjoyed movies and restaurants and aikido classes. My kids enjoyed playgrounds and Christmas lights, and children’s museums. Unlike these city pleasures, Nature is something we can share. Walking through a snowy forest, even at 4 year old speed, even with a 2 year old on my back, I’m not just experiencing joy through the eyes of my children. I’m actually enjoying myself.

Family packraft camping

Philosophically, I do it because I think they need it. To run, explore and discover in some place real — in an environment that hasn’t been designed just for them. To imagine and observe. To feel their own strength and power in the face of the difficulties and discomforts that come along with nature.

I think the world needs it too. Needs people who know both how to plug in and unplug. To talk and to observe. Who realize that they can thrive in situations far beyond what they ever imagined. Of course, you think I’m talking about the kids here. Which I am. But I’m talking just as much about the parents. Parenthood can feel so overwhelming and intimidating, that sometimes it can suck you right “into the box” of doing exactly what you think you’re supposed to do, or what everyone else is doing — rather than what’s best for you, your family, or the world.

The Next Three Million Steps

Katmai stomps the sea foam in a rising tide

If Katmai’s stride length is around half of an adult’s, the 800 miles around Cook Inlet will be made of three million steps. But the steps I’m thinking about right now are the ones we need to do before we leave.

Training the four-year-old to cheerily hike long distances is something we’re accomplishing all the time. Training the two-year-old to be happy on those long hikes is something we’re still working on. Training the adults to plan for an expedition without a heap of procrastination and last-minute stress is a hopeless cause. We’ve barely started finding, fixing, making, and buying the gear on our gear list, and our potential resupply points in western Cook Inlet, are still, for the most part, gaping holes in our knowledge.

But we’ll get there.

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Eroding bluffs stand above the shoreline of Lake Iliamna.

2012 was a busy year for scientists working on issues related to Pebble Mine. I’m one of those scientists. I received my PhD studying tsunamis and learned a bit about earthquakes along the way. Given that PLP hopes to build giant dams that need to stand forever, earthquakes are a fairly important question. Between completing my own geologic fieldwork and critiquing the work of PLP and the EPA, there’s been plenty to keep me busy – so much so that I neglected to post anything on our blog about it all year, despite a number of interesting developments.

Backstory: Is Pebble Mine really safe from earthquakes?

If developed, Pebble Mine would tap the largest gold deposit on the planet, and the copper in that deposit would likely be worth even more than all that gold. Its footprint would sit on the headwaters of some of the world’s greatest salmon rivers. It would leave behind towering tailings dams that would pose catastrophic risk for millennia, long after the boom of the mine has been forgotten.

The mine company’s perspective is simple and hasn’t changed since at least 2006: The threat of earthquakes is low because there are no active faults nearby.

This optimistic view of seismic hazard is based on ignorance. Existing scientific studies tell us almost nothing about faults in the area.

I wrote a letter of concern in early 2008 to Alaska’s Department of Natural Resources (DNR) about the uncertainty regarding seismic hazard near Pebble.

More importantly, I’ve tried to do something about that uncertainty – trying to locate and characterize earthquake faults in the area myself. In the years since, I have gone into the field to gather data as often as our meager funding would allow, frequently with my colleague Andrew Mattox. As 2012 dawned, we had a few promising leads.

Seven pages out of 30,800

In February 2012, PLP released a whopping 30,800-page “Environmental Baseline Document” (EBD) that included data and analyses from $120 million in scientific studies in the mine area. This document was meant to describe current conditions in the region around the mine – conditions that would both affect and be affected by mine development.

The seismic hazard analysis was only 7 pages long.

I had had high expectations for this document. In earlier statements, PLP hinted at carefully collected geophysical data that might reveal the location of the Lake Clark Fault, a fault that is of particular interest since it’s large and goes somewhere in the vicinity of the mine. It turned out that not one bit of new data was presented in the chapter’s four pages of text plus three figures.

The analysis also used scientific reasoning that was often bizarre or ridiculous. The rocks near the mine site are too strong for faults to break them? Faults follow glaciers? Both of these assertions can be easily disproven by example.

I lambasted PLP in the press and in a detailed report:

“The seismic hazard assessment presented in Pebble Limited Partnership’s Environmental Baseline Document is flawed. It draws strong, optimistic conclusions from weak evidence, and relies on geologic arguments inconsistent with observed evidence. It misrepresents existing research and fails to use key data sets that PLP has in-hand to inform the analysis. A major fault, the Lake Clark Fault, passes near the Pebble prospect. No published studies establish this fault’s location or seismic activity near the prospect, and the hazard assessment presents no effort to positively determine its location. The hazard assessment fails to consider minor faults or induced seismicity. Without further study, the hazard posed by earthquakes is impossible to determine. “

It was satisfying to holler, “Your Science is WEAK!” but it left me wondering why it was so weak.

PLP must either be strategically holding back information, or else it lacks the expertise to do a real seismic hazard assessment. Put crudely: Either PLP is lying, or it’s incompetent.

Is PLP lying?

In February 2011, Northern Dynasty, half-owner of PLP, released a report announcing, “The location of [the Lake Clark] fault has been identified as part of a geophysical survey of the region.”

Between this report (which lacked both data and analysis) and an email conversation I had with Ken Taylor, PLP’s former “VP for the Environment,” it appears that this identification was based on studies that PLP had conducted. Yet, the EBD omits this work, which can hardly be an accident. Why rely on old assumptions about the location of the Lake Clark Fault when your own scientists have located it using geophysical data?

Maybe PLP didn’t like the results of its earlier work, so instead it published a false analysis that told a rosier story.

Is PLP incompetent?

Perhaps the poor quality of PLP’s seismic hazard assessment is unintentional. The bizarre assertions, lack of new scientific studies, and misinterpretation of existing literature are mistakes. Graham Greenaway, the main author of the seismic hazard assessment, isn’t even a geologist, so it’s understandable that he might not see the weaknesses. It’s frustrating to me that PLP has stood by its analysis despite my work to clearly lay out the problems (I’ve shared this with PLP on a number of occasions), but what more can you do?

Isolated chunks of sediment floated in a soup of sand, silt, and water presumably liquefied by shaking.

Tales from the dirt

I suppose one thing I could do is try to figure out what’s going on myself. Andrew and I flew out to Lake Iliamna last June in search of evidence of earthquakes. We aimed to check out a couple of leads: A possible telltale sag in ancient shorelines above the lake suggesting a buried fault, and swirled sediment resulting from liquefaction, a common effect of strong shaking from earthquakes.

We hit a geologist’s jackpot: We found where an ancient peat bog suddenly burst open, a great fountain of liquefied sand pouring out to cover the ground. This sort of dramatic liquefaction is rare, and nearly always occurs during strong earthquakes. Examples of this phenomenon can be seen in eyewitness videos during earthquakes in Japan and Christchurch, NZ.

In combination with evidence that we found of tectonic deformation in the old shorelines, this liquefaction is decent evidence for past earthquakes. For more details, you can read our preliminary report.

Who cares about ‘Science’ anyway?

Having publicized our work, I’d like to think that our job here is done. I have contacted scientists working for PLP and regulatory agencies, and ideally they will follow up on our findings, possibly confirming that the Lake Clark Fault is indeed active. Such a conclusion might warrant expensive changes to tailings dam engineering or abandonment of mine plans and prompt these organizations to inform local communities about risks such as strong shaking and lake tsunamis.

Honestly I don’t really understand how scientific results inform regulatory decisions, but what I’ve seen so far does not make me confident. It’s very easy to fail to find evidence. The mine company has financial incentives to overlook evidence of earthquake risk, just as I have financial motivation beyond merely curiosity to find that evidence – my funding comes from groups opposed to mine development. And regulators, ideally the impartial party here, have tight budgets and a broad mandate, thus little time to focus deeply on a difficult scientific problem like this. Tackling this problem would put government scientists into a political minefield that they may not wish to enter.

This year we’ve seen “the system” attempting to face the scientific challenges presented by the massive scale of Pebble Mine. The EPA, on the invitation of villages in the region, conducted a detailed “Watershed Assessment,” which is still under peer review. PLP criticized the EPA’s effort as premature and misguided, and pushed its own process, the PLP-funded Keystone Center dialogue. This in turn has been criticized for its biased exclusion of non-PLP science, among other things. Though I submitted my own work on seismic hazards, it was not considered even during the panel specifically on this topic. These efforts represent attempts to assemble expert assessments and critique PLP‘s science, but we’re a long way off from seeing concrete results from either. Though I’ve repeatedly pointed out unequivocal flaws in PLP‘s seismic hazard assessment, there was no acknowledgment of these issues as of the Keystone meeting in early October. If you want to see my testimony, you can go here, and skip to 17 minutes, 40 seconds.

So I’m going to stick to it. I have more data analysis, and a paper to write and submit for peer review. And hopefully I’ll have funding to get back into the field this summer.

Often it seems like marketers and politicians control the big issues. But I do believe that objective truth has a small edge in the game. It may not guarantee success, but it’s a nice ally to have. I think science is our best tool to uncover this objective truth.

Sedimentary layers show evidence of liquefaction – perhaps caused by strong earthquake shaking.

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Alaska becoming a major cement exporter? Millions of tons of coal being shipped from Healy to Cook Inlet? I thought these purported benefits from the Port MacKenzie railroad extension seemed more than a little optimistic so I dug deeper.

It turns out that the misleading economic analysis in support of the project relies on vast amounts of theoretical and unlikely future development in the rail corridor. It proposes that Port Mac will create billions of dollars worth of new industries (which would not otherwise be created). Most egregiously, it proposes that several major mines (one on the scale of the Pebble Prospect, and dwarfing all current mineral production in Alaska) will spring into existence with little regard to the underlying geology — in an area where mining companies are not even exploring for significant minerals. Not even discussed is the possible negative impact of winter ice on Port Mac which is not a problem for the major competing ports.

The Controversy

Proponents of this project say that building the extension would spur economic development throughout the Railbelt. Opponents worry that this development will never materialize and the project will be a boondoggle, or simply turn out to be a very expensive way to subsidize the export of Usibelli coal.

Put another way, do the benefits exceed the costs or vice versa? This quote, from a report attempting to answer this question provides a good starting place for a conversation:

“The primary analysis indicates that the net present value of rail freight savings
from the proposed rail link relative to the Ports of Whittier and Seward greatly exceeds
the capital cost of the proposed project. The net present value of the rail freight savings
for Port MacKenzie relative to the Port of Anchorage over a 30 year period equals 92%
of the capital cost of the project.“

Basically, the argument is that building the rail spur is worth it, because transporting things to Port MacKenzie will cost much less than transporting them to Whittier and Seward. But how realistic are those savings? To answer this question I spent some time reading a number of reports that attempt to quantify the benefits of building the extension. And I was quite struck by how fanciful some of these benefits appeared. Discussed here are two reports by Paul Metz (here and here).

What will be Shipped?

What exports are currently transported to Seward and Whittier that would be cheaper to send to Port Mac instead? Currently, Usibelli coal is the only example I’m aware of. Shipping this coal probably would be cheaper from Port Mackenzie, though not creating nearly enough value to justify the port’s construction on its own. The rest of the savings come from postulated future industries.

To begin, Metz describes a 120-mile corridor around the existing railroad and then estimates all of the development that could materialize in this corridor if the Port Mac extension were built. He rightly points out that the cost of sending things from Port Mac would be lower than Anchorage, Seward, or particularly Whittier. However, it’s very hard to justify the claim that these developments he describes would not have occurred without the Port Mac spur. But to be part of the cost-benefit analysis, that needs to be the case. Here are the assumptions made by Metz along with my thoughts.

Assumptions:

Annual production from natural resources along the existing railroad (attributable to the building of the extension). Savings are calculated relative to other AK ports.

2 million tons of mineral ore (20% of savings). This appears to be totally unrealistic, more detail below.

3.5 million tons of Portland cement for export (35% of savings). Right here I should state that I have no experience with this particular industry. However, everyone I have discussed this with feels that this seems wildly optimistic. It’s hard to imagine that with Alaskan logistics, labor costs, and transportation that making cement in Alaska could really be competitive with established global markets. Metz mentions exporting to the West Coast but presumably the Jones Act would make this an even more expensive option. The materials would come from a deposit north of Fairbanks (Globe Creek).

1 million tons of export coal (10% of savings): It seems totally reasonable to me that building the Port Mac spur would save Usibelli money. Though they would have to build an export terminal of some kind at Port Mac.

3.3 million additional tons of coal for gasification at Agrium (33% of savings): This is outdated, not only does Usibelli not have the capacity to produce this much coal without major capital improvements but Agrium is long-gone, and the gasification infrastructure was never built. Clearly these savings are not happening.

20,000 tons of timber (negligible savings): I have no idea if this is realistic or not, it’s too small to have much impact on the analysis either way.

200,000 tons of benzene (<2% of savings): This would come from Flint Hills, but assumes a petrochemical processing plant would be built at the port site. Since there’s no such plant, or plans for one that I’m aware of, this seems shaky.

Imaginary Mines – A deeper look at the mineral assumptions of Metz

While the minerals are only responsible for 20% of the cost savings relative to existing ports, they provide the lion’s share of the jobs discussed in a subsequent ISER analysis by Steve Colt. For this reason I looked in more detail at these assumptions.

From ISER 2010:

“Major new mines shipping concentrate via the rail extension would generate thousands of new jobs, and a significant fraction of these jobs would be held by Anchorage residents. Our detailed analysis of the potential employment from five specific mining projects indicates that more than 2,000 average annual jobs would be created in Anchorage or held by Anchorage residents once the mines are fully developed. Most of these jobs would be in mining and in professional sectors that pay good wages. Also, during initial mine development, many of the jobs would be in construction and fabrication.”

…

“Dr. Paul Metz, Professor of Geological Engineering and director of the Mining Industry
Research Lab at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, predicts that the rail extension will lower the cost of exporting mineral concentrate to the point that it will directly stimulate the development of three new mineral deposits within a 120-mile-wide corridor surrounding the existing railroad in Interior Alaska. Mat-Su Borough officials also assume that a cement and lime mining and production operation would be developed as a result of the railroad extension. We have used these five mining projects as a case study to calculate the resulting expected benefits to Anchorage from the rail extension.”

This is where the assumptions appear to most diverge from reality. Check out this chart from ISER 2010 (based on the Metz analyses):

The first three lines seem reasonable. The fourth line is where it starts to get funky. “Mine B” would produce 1.7 million tons of concentrate annually (all needing to be shipped by rail of course). Red Dog mine, currently the largest in Alaska and the largest zinc mine in the world, only ships ~1.4 million tons. Then the questions blossom with the metal values. “Mine B” would produce metal with a value of $5.1 billion per year. For reference the entire state of Alaska produced metals (all metals, placer and hardrock) worth $3 billion in 2010 (same year as the ISER report where I obtained this table) – less than half the amount that would supposedly be produced by these new mines Port Mac would create.

So basically for this to all pan out they need a mine bigger than Red Dog, as well as a couple of other mines, to commence operations as a direct result of the Port Mac spur… and be located near the railroad. There are two additional points worth noting here:

1) Mineral exploration in the state is occurring at an all-time high. It’s all over the state… wherever the geology is good, there are people drilling. Access to infrastructure is clearly important for the development of a mining prospect, but one could argue that since no one is even *looking* for a massive deposit near the railroad (see below) that the geology may not be as favorable as assumed.

2) Most of the currently active mineral exploration projects in the Fairbanks area and near the railroad are pursuing gold deposits. Gold mines do not typically ship significant quantities of ore, they ship out dore bars which would have a negligible impact on the railroad and are just as easily transported by truck or even air.

Therefore I took at look at mineral prospects being explored that are within the 120-mile corridor described by Metz. I ignored all the gold-only prospects, of which there are several including the large Livengood Prospect. There are only three possibilities (Golden Zone, Stone Boy, and Shorty Creek) and there certainly doesn’t appear to be anything like a “mine B” which is described as a “a Porphyry Cu- Mo-Au-Ag deposit of large size (ninetieth percentile [in the world] of tonnage and grade) located in the north flank of the Alaska Range.” The only mine prospect in the entire state that has enough ore to qualify as a “mine B” is probably Pebble (Porphyry Cu- Mo-Au-Ag), far from any connection to Port Mac.

Circular reasoning:

Just as an aside, there is some amusing circular logic in the ISER report as well. First, they argue that the rail extension would cause these five mines to spring into existence. Since they assure us that those operations would not otherwise have existed, they count all their benefits in the cost-benefit analysis for the extension. However, one of those benefits is the traffic avoidance if these facilities had to ship all that ore/cement by truck on existing roads.

Summary:

I have no doubt that building the Port Mac extension would benefit some industries. However, it’s hard to imagine Alaska becoming a giant cement exporter (35% of savings), it seems unlikely that a massive mineral deposit worth more than all current production will be developed near the railroad (~20% of savings), and clearly there will not be millions of tons of coal going to a never-built gasification plant to service a now-defunct facility (33% of savings). Remove these putative benefits and the cost-benefit analysis for the spur suddenly looks a lot less rosy.

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Globally, temperature has been rising as the CO2 from burning of fossil fuels insulates the earth. The most pronounced warming has occurred in the last several decades, especially in the arctic.

not at the same scale as graph above – AK has actually seen more warming than the global average

But that’s a global average. I also really want to know what’s happening right here. So, I had some fun staring at the more-local temperature graphs. Looking at Alaska specifically, temperature records only go back to 1949, and basically consist of a cold half (1949-1976) and a warm half (1977-today). So even Hig, who grew up here, never experienced that cold. During the cold half, the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (a natural cycle of ocean temperatures with a time frame of 20-30 years) brought cold waters to the eastern North Pacific, and warm waters to the western North Pacific – making Alaska cooler. In the late 1970s, the Pacific Decadal Oscillation switched, and Alaska got warm.

What next? Well, the Pacific Decadal Oscillation appears to be dropping back into a persistently cold phase, and if that was the only big factor here, I’d expect to see Alaska dipping back down into those 1949-1976 temperatures along with it. Actually, I’d expect that to have happened already, given the PDO in the last few years has been as low as it was in the early 70s. But human-caused climate change introduces a consistent and increasing warming trend, which coexists with natural variation.

So, cool periods get less cool, and warm periods get even warmer. Average temperatures will continue to climb, more rapidly during natural warm cycles, and more rapidly as the carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere continue to increase. We might never see temperatures as cold as the 1949-1979 average again – certainly not over any extended time frame. And next time the Pacific Decadal Oscillation shifts into a warm phase, we’ll probably see temperatures shoot well above the exceptionally warm years seen in the early 2000s. The latest report by the USGS shows predicted temperature increases across the state for the 21st century, against a reference frame of 1971 to 2000 temperatures (a period already dominated by warm). The degree of future change is predicted to be greatest in the northwestern regions of the state, and greatest during winter months, as has been true of the warming Alaska has already experienced.

From this USGS report: left shows a higher emissions (A2) and right a lower emissions (B2) scenario for the years 2070-2099.

The narrow time frame of recorded temperatures and the high natural variability of Alaska climate makes local temperature trends difficult to pick out from measurements alone. Global data is much more robust, and shows warming trends more clearly. But temperature measurements aren’t our only signal. Alaska’s overall warming trend is clearly visible in its natural systems, including melting permafrost, shrinking glaciers, advancing trees and shrubs, disappearing sea ice, dramatic coastal erosion, and changing species distributions.

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