In Island Village Of Kivalina, AK Natives Prepare To Leave As Beaches Disappear Under Rising Seas

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Kivalina is disappearing, the victim of a warming world and a steady natural erosion that probably began long before the Eskimos settled here 100 years ago. "You see the white water out there?" Swan said, pointing to some ripples a couple hundred feet offshore. "That's where the beach used to be." When he was growing up here in the 1970s, the ocean would freeze each fall into a slush the thickness of mashed potatoes. Waves from the storms would crash into the ice, not the shore.

Lately, the autumn ocean has been a vast, iceless expanse that leaves the beach vulnerable to waves. The island is now a sliver of sand and permafrost less than 600 feet across at its widest point. The Army Corps of Engineers estimates it will be 10 to 15 years before the ground beneath the clump of clapboard houses washes away.

The prospect of Kivalina's disappearance has set off its own storm, jarring a place that, like most of global warming's early victims, has long struggled on the fringes of the planet. Most of the 400 residents -- filled with dreams of a new village with running water, better homes and, perhaps, a chance at a job -- want to leave.

The big questions are: To where? And how? Village leaders have squabbled for years with state and federal officials over relocating, which could cost as much as $250 million. No one has offered to pay. Residents themselves are divided over where to go. Some want to move to higher ground. Others want to stay on the coast, even at the risk of seeing their new homes eventually disappear to erosion and rising seas. It's an impasse that has left them stuck on a shrinking mound of sand that even their ancestors thought was a lousy place to build a town.

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http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-sci-kivalina25nov25,0,4146460,full.story