USA: Global Warming

SHISHMAREF, AK - JUNE 16: A telling sign of climate change, flies work on a piece of drying seal meat on a rack near the shores of the Chukchi Sea, just outside of Shishmaref, June 16, 2005 in Shishmaref, Alaska, USA. "We never had flies this early in the spring before, when the meat is hanging. But now it's warm" laments 70 years old Inupoiat Eskimo Flora Weyiouanna. Traditionally, spring seal hunting around the village of Shishnmaref has been done on the ice, by dog sled or snow machine, but climate change has forced the Eskimos to use their hand made boats, normally reserved for the fall hunt when the sea is clear of ice. They must drag the boats over the thinning ice to open water, where they must navigate between floating ice in search of seals. Located on the small island of Sarichef off the coast of Alaska near the Artic circle, Shishmaref, population 591, is a century old Inupiat Eskimo village whose economy depends partly on subsistence fishing and hunting. Shishmaref will have to be evacuated within the next few years because of global warming. Climate change has caused the Chukchi sea, which surrounds the island, not to freeze before the arrival of the fierce fall storms, as it has for centuries, leaving the island unprotected. In the last ten years, hundreds of feet of shore as well as several houses have been lost to the storms. Eighteen houses also had to be moved away from the edge of the island, to which scientists have given another nine years. Poised to become the world's first global warming refugees, Shishmaref's Inupiat Eskimos are struggling for their survival: the government would like to move them to the suburbs of the city of Nome, where the Eskimos fear that their traditional lifestyle will be lost. Instead, Shishmaref's inhabitants want to setttle in Tin Creek, an isolated, undevelloped location some sixteen miles away, a more expensive endeavor, whose cost has been estimated at more than 180 milions. (Photo by Gilles Mingasson/Getty Image