The Race to Alaska Before It Melts

[unhappycamper]

The Race to Alaska Before It Melts
By TIMOTHY EGAN
Published: June 26, 2005

THEY stood and gawked at the great blue mass of shrinking ice. Behold: a frozen landscape giving it up to a midnight sunset. The scene at the receding edge of the Exit Glacier in Kenai Fjords National Park in Alaska was part festive gathering, part nature tour with an apocalyptic edge. Dressed in tank tops and shorts - beachwear, in fact - on this freakishly warm day in early June, people moved ever closer to the rope line near the glacier as it shied away, practically groaning and melting before their eyes.

A product of the late ice age, the glacier looked old and tired on this hot day. There was a sense of loss, some people said, at watching this giant recoil. There were oohs and aahs but also more hushed tones, expressions of fear that the big land was somehow diminished, a little less wild. Just a few years ago, the spot where these tourists stood, on dry ground marked by Park Service signs, had been under ice.

Alaska is changing by the hour. From the far north, where higher seas are swamping native villages, to the tundra around Fairbanks, where melting permafrost is forcing some roads and structures to buckle in what looks like a cartoon version of a hangover, to the rivers of ice receding from inlets, warmer temperatures are remaking the Last Frontier State.



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