Author Jon Waterman calls Carbondale, Colorado, home, but he has spent decades exploring some of the most remote and wild places in the country.
In 1983, he worked as a ranger in Gates of the Arctic National Park and fell in love with its frozen landscape. Nearly four decades later, when he returned, he was shocked by the changes brought on by the climate crisis. He details these transformations in his new book, Into the Thaw.
When he returned to Gates of the Arctic National Park in 2021, Waterman says he didn’t recognize the landscape.
"For one thing, the river was flooding. I'd never seen it flooded so high," he said.
In addition to the flooding, Waterman said it was unseasonably warm, allowing him to swim in the river. "Something I would never would have considered three decades ago."
These observations, Waterman said, pointed to deeper changes in the ecosystem.
"When I first came here in 1983, there was an abundance of wildlife," Waterman recalled, describing scenes of caribou wandering the landscape, chased by wolves. But in recent years, the caribou have almost disappeared.
"The herd hasn't entirely vanished," he explained, "but it's greatly diminished, as have herds throughout the circumpolar Arctic due to climate change and diminishing habitat."
The delayed migration of caribou due to longer Arctic summers is impacting the region's ecosystem.
"The lack of predators that typically follow the herd from the wolves and the foxes to the bears," said Waterman. "So I think that we're just beginning to figure out what those changes are now as the herd continues to diminish."
The cultural implications are also significant, particularly for the Iñupiat people, who have relied on caribou for subsistence for tens of thousands of years.
"The people that subsist on these caribou are having difficulty hunting them," he said.
"And when they do return, they found that the caribou... their hides are now scarred by all the brush they have to go through."
The title of Waterman’s book refers not only to the melting ice in the Arctic but also to the loss of permafrost.
"In the north, the ground is underlain by as much as 600 feet of permafrost, permanently frozen soil. And this permafrost has locked up thousands, tens of thousands of years, hundreds of thousands of years worth of microbes and animals and plant matter. And now it's in the process of a great thaw. So it's literally changing the landscape," he said
This thawing has significant consequences, as giant landslides, called thermokarsts, caused by melting permafrost, are becoming more common, sending silt and mud into rivers.
The diminishing sea ice further compounds the problem, and creates issues far beyond the region.
"The Arctic is the world's air conditioner, along with the Antarctic, and as we lose the sea ice, it's changing the currents as far down as into the Atlantic," said Waterman.
"We have these polar vortexes now that sweep over the lower 48 (states), which I suppose occurred very infrequently in the past, but now we're seeing them quite regularly. So what happens in the Arctic is also what happens here because it regulates the world's temperatures."
Waterman will speak about Into the Thaw on Oct. 30 at the Patagonia Store in Denver, and on Nov. 3 at the Gunnison Public Library.
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