Far from being a pristine landscape, the Arctic is riddled with evidence of this history. Rusted mining equipment, spilled toxins, and abandoned locomotives are everywhere, if you know where to look. The Yukon River, which flows 2,000 miles from Canada to Western Alaska, dumps up to five tons of mercury into the North Pacific each year—the remnants of a gold rush that ended over a century ago. On St. Lawrence Island, not far from Nome, 180,000 gallons of diesel were spilled at a Cold War–era military base in 1969, destroying a Siberian Yupik hunting and fishing camp.
But this most recent rush to the Arctic is decidedly different from previous ones, pushing further North and seeking out different resources. I spoke with Rick Thomen, a climatologist at the University of Alaska Fairbanks who enjoys a certain celebrity status in the state. “In some significant sense,” he told me, “we can say that the construction boom is entirely climate change driven.”
Projects that were uneconomical in the twentieth century now pencil out favorably. This is particularly true as sea ice retreats and thins, offering longer periods when the oceans are navigable. The sea outside Nome is still frozen for several months each winter, but the ice arrives later and melts earlier. According to Thomen, projects such as the Nome port expansion bet on continued global warming; there is a “near certainty that in the coming decades, open water season will lengthen beyond what it is now.”