Alaska News

VIDEO: Vanishing World

Newtok has been sinking into the sea slowly but surely. This rural village of approximately 300 people, predominantly Yup'ik Eskimo, needs to relocate before the village is submerged.

The permanently frozen subsoil known as permafrost that many villages in Alaska are built on is slowly melting due to the warming ocean temperatures. With the shoreline receding, villages are vulnerable to powerful storms that continually erode the landscape around them. According to reporting by New York Times, studies say Newtok, already below sea level, could be washed away within a decade. Along with the villages of Shishmaref and Kivalina farther north, Newtok has been the hardest hit of about 180 Alaska villages that suffer some degree of erosion.

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