Alaska Shoreline Rapidly Eroding

Coastal erosion in northern Alaska has turned ponds into ocean bays and caused cliffs to crumble into the sea, scientists reported.

Scientists from the U.S. Geological Survey didn’t directly blame global warming for the doubling in speed of coastal erosion of the Alaskan northern coast, but they said that climate change in Alaska has caused average temperatures there to rise by 3.6 to 5.4 degrees Fahrenheit, The San Francisco Chronicle reported.

On this sensitive area, land and resource managers must consider the natural effects of a 30-year warming trend that has resulted in ice-pack shrinkage and deterioration of permafrost, as well as the potential impact of proposed human activity, the scientists, John Mars and David Houseknecht of the survey’s headquarters in Reston, Va., wrote, the newspaper reported.

The human activity they referred to is petroleum leases on Alaska’s North Slope proposed by the Bush administration, the Chronicle reported.

The geologists, who analyzed 50-year-old topographic maps and current maps, said the shoreline has moved in more than one-half mile since 1955.