Preparing for Oil Spills on Alaska’s Arctic Park Coasts as Ship Traffic Grows

Bering Land Bridge National Preserve and Cape Krusenstern National Monument hold about 994 miles (1,600 kilometers) of mostly soft-sediment Arctic coast, rich in life: vast shallow lagoons, large estuaries, barrier islands, sandy capes, salt marshes, mudflats, brackish wetlands and the world’s northernmost eelgrass beds. The authors say these shorelines, like those of eastern North America before European contact, are wild, dynamic, productive and extensive. Now sea ice is retreating, ships are coming, and the parks are preparing for oil spills.

Arctic people depend on bearded seals and other ice seals as an important food resource. NPS / Peter Neitlich.

Ice, ships and a strait

Sea ice has retreated by an average of 1.3 percent per year since the 1950s. Through 2015 the September Arctic sea ice extent had decreased by 13.4 percent per decade, relative to the 1981-2010 average, and the nine lowest September extents had all come in the nine years before. In summer the ice pack is now far enough north to let ships use both the Northern Sea Route above Siberia and the Northwest Passage through the Canadian Archipelago, and vessel traffic through the Bering Strait has increased dramatically.

The Bering Strait, which connects the Bering Sea to the Chukchi Sea, is the only connection from the Pacific Ocean into Arctic waters, so all Pacific marine traffic to or from the Arctic Ocean must pass through it, immediately beside the two parks. Cargo ships and fuel tankers already use the Northern Sea Route’s shipping lanes between Asia and Europe and North America, and traffic is projected to rise by as much as 500% by 2025 from 2015 transit estimates. Large cruise ship tourism is emerging as well: a 1,100-passenger ship had recently completed the Northwest Passage from Anchorage to New York.

More ships mean more risk of marine incidents. Given how close the new shipping lanes are to these once-remote areas, the Park Service has embarked on an ambitious plan to prepare for oil spills by characterizing the biological and physical properties of the coastlines.

What is at stake

The marine waters off the parks are shallow and highly productive, perched atop a barely inundated continental shelf. Pacific walrus feed on sea floor invertebrates, four species of ice seals eat large quantities of fish, and polar bears move south seasonally to hunt the seals. Several species of whales migrate through every year, an estimated 12 million seabirds nest or feed in the area each year, and as many as 37 species of shorebirds nest or gather there before migrating. Whitefish move in and out of the lagoons, and chum salmon run in tremendous numbers into Kotzebue Sound and the Noatak and Kobuk river systems, joined by other salmon and the iconic sheefish.

Iñupiat have lived along these coasts for hundreds of generations, closely tied to marine and land mammals. The health of the region’s coastal and marine ecosystems, the authors write, is inextricable from the health and welfare of its communities. Marine mammals, especially bearded seals and other ice seals, make up as much as 68 percent of Bering Strait residents’ diets, with much of the rest from land mammals. At oil spill response workshops sponsored by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the U.S. Coast Guard, local communities said a spill with a catastrophic effect on marine mammals would be equally catastrophic for residents and their traditional lifestyles.

Erosion is accelerated by the lack of sea ice that normally protects the coast during strong storms and by the thawing of exposed permafrost and ice deposits. NPS / Peter Neitlich.

Erosion and debris

Warming ocean water has delayed the formation of shore-fast ice until November or December. In the past the ice froze along the shoreline in October or early November and shielded the coast from strong fall storms, which now cause surges of up to 12 feet and large-scale erosion averaging about 2.95 feet (0.9 meters) per year. The erosion is helped by the thaw of permafrost and of yedoma, relict Pleistocene ice deposits, on the coast, which makes the soil more erodible. Recent surveys and community reports show significant loss of soft-sediment beaches. Marine debris, including plastic garbage, derelict fishing gear, rope, tarps, foam and plastic crates, is also accumulating on Arctic coasts.

Monitoring

When the Park Service’s Arctic Network planned its monitoring, six of the 28 indicators it chose concerned the coast: coastal erosion, lagoon communities and ecosystems, Yellow-billed Loons, sea ice, fish assemblages and subsistence resources. It has made the most progress on the first three.

A lagoon monitoring crew doing field work. NPS / Tahzay Jones.

• Erosion. Comparing older and more recent aerial and satellite images produced a detailed picture of erosion and accretion rates along the whole coastline of the two units. Erosion has long been recognized in low-lying communities such as Shishmaref and Kivalina, but its extent along the park shores surprised park researchers and managers.
• Lagoons. They shelter many birds and fish and sustain a vital subsistence fishery for villages, and because most Arctic lagoons are still relatively free of human impact they are among the last naturally functioning lagoon systems in the world. Very little research has covered lagoon fish in the western Arctic, and local fishermen have seen a loss of whitefish in some areas, which shows the need to understand what drives the perceived declines.
• Yellow-billed Loons. The birds depend on marine and fresh water and are considered one of the ten rarest breeding birds of the United States, of international concern, with a global population estimated at 16,650-21,000. About 20-25% of them occur seasonally in Alaska, where the summer breeding population is estimated at less than 5,000. As top predators that migrate each year to the Yellow Sea they are prone to contaminant bioaccumulation, and because they return to the same nesting grounds each year they suit long-term monitoring.

Projects under way

Since 2011 the Park Service has focused more on coastal and lagoon environments. Planning for spill response in the northwestern Arctic exposed large gaps in the understanding of coastal systems and a significant shortfall in spill containment capability, and in the two years before the article the coastal Arctic parks began closing those gaps with significant funding for applied coastal research. The article names four projects of particular note: community integrated response planning, whitefish ecology and seasonal use of lagoons, a shorebird census and species of special concern, and marine debris cleanup and education. Its table lists more, with the years funded and their status when it was written:

A number of funded projects will add to this preparedness agenda. The goal is more baseline data, so that in a spill the parks have the information to assess and reduce damage to natural resources.

Outlook

The authors write that the Arctic coastal parks face new threats from climate change and related economic trends. How much shipping the Chukchi Sea will see is not known, but the likelihood of some marine incident grows with traffic, and vessel traffic modelling based on past ship data may help quantify it. Physical scientists have predicted that the Arctic may be free of summer ice by 2040 or sooner. Remote parks, people and cultures, the authors say, increasingly find themselves in complex and novel situations, and with President Obama’s visit to Kotzebue in summer 2015 and U.S. leadership of the Arctic Council (2015-2017), they hope attention, partnerships and funding may follow.

Sources

• Peter Neitlich, Tahzay Jones and Jim Lawler (National Park Service) and Trevor Haynes (Wildlife Conservation Society), Synthesis of Coastal Issues and Projects in the Western Arctic National Parklands, Alaska Park Science, volume 16 (Science in Alaska’s Arctic Parks); the source’s duplicated second project table and three of its project rows are left out; rewritten in hubnx's own words.