Global Warming Imperils Alaska Village
Residents Seek To Move Town As Melting Ice Sends Sea Creeping In
SHISHMAREF, Alaska, Aug. 22, 2006
(CBS) CBS News correspondent Jerry Bowen reports Alaska, America's spectacular last frontier, is now Earth's hot spot.
Just ask Deborah Williams, of Alaska Conservation Solutions. "I used to bring people to this spot to see the glacier; now I bring people here to not see the glacier," she says. "Nine percent of the rise of sea levels in the world is because of melting Alaska glaciers."
No place says "baked Alaska" like the Eskimo village of Shishmaref, a barrier island town of 600 residents on the state's west coast.
Shishmaref's natives, called Inupiat, still survive on the salmon and seal they catch, along with the ivory and bone carvings they sell to outsiders.
The town has been the winter home of the Inupiat for 4,000 years, and became their permanent home only after they adopted Western ways with permanent housing. But there's nothing permanent about the village now, with the sea swallowing up one home after another.
It's because the protective sea ice that used to buffer the village against storms isn't as massive or long-lasting now — the weather's been too warm for too long. That makes the shoreline vulnerable to erosion at an average of 10 feet a year....
