‘Into the Thaw’: Jon Waterman on a Changing Alaska

With each new federal administration, energy priorities shift. With the election of Donald Trump in 2024, one of his administration’s key promises, enforced by an executive order on January 20 this year and as promised in Project 2025, was to try to ramp up oil and gas drilling in the continental U.S. A key location for increased extraction? Alaska, the remote northern state that always seems to be at the tip of the tongue when the expression “drill, baby, drill” is uttered. 

But despite the fervor from the administration, recent lease auctions for drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge failed to find a buyer. Other locations off the shore of Alaska are more likely to see increasing oil production, and some, like the massive Pikka Project on the north slope of Alaska, are already underway. 

One person who knows Alaska as deeply as anyone can who doesn’t live there is writer and explorer Jon Waterman.

“I suppose I’ve taken 50 or 60 different trips and expeditions to Alaska,” he says. 

His new book, Into the Thaw: Witnessing Wonder Amid the Arctic Climate Crisis, reminds us, in beautifully rendered prose and photos, of the beauty of Alaska, and what’s at stake as the land, wildlife and peoples feel the pressures of climate breakdown and increased oil and gas production. 

Waterman writes: 

The sea ice has melted away as storms erode shorelines and flood villages. Forests are slowly on the move north along with animals new to the Arctic. The permafrost has begun to thaw, and lakes have disappeared as riverbanks and mountainsides droop like frozen spinach left out on the counter. 

The book tracks his most recent visit into Noatak River in Gates of the Arctic National Park, and what he saw that was so drastically different from his first visit 39 years ago. 

How would you describe the climate crisis in Alaska? 

The sea ice is what makes travel safe for the people in the summertime. Sea ice is what allows the polar bears to hunt their seals. And it controls the temperature of the Arctic.

The tree lines have begun to move north. The permafrost is thawing. It’s a whole cascade, like dominoes knocking one another over as the Arctic continues to warm. In fact, Alaska has warmed four times faster than the rest of the Earth.

And in your view, what’s different about this climate change compared with others from the long history of our planet, which you write about in the book?

The difference with the last 150 years is that it’s happened so quickly. And it’s the Anthropocene. Humans have caused this change, and that’s never happened before.

Can you tell me more about the melting permafrost? What are the impacts of that on the far north? 

As that permafrost thaws, the microbes begin to eat all this plant matter and that releases carbon dioxide gases. But it also releases methane, which is a much more potent greenhouse gas. And this could equal one of the largest triggers of greenhouse gases, because there’s so much methane and carbon stored in the ground that is abruptly thawing in many places.

On hillsides and mountainsides throughout the Arctic, it’s now very common to see what looks like landslides. These are recent thermalkarsts thawing. Downstream of these thermalkarsts, they’re just pumping tons of mud and silt into the river. And that affects the local villagers because they can’t fish. And then even more importantly, it affects all the aquatic life from the fish on down to the microbial life.

And what about the wildlife? 

The lengthening seasons and the lengthening summer have changed the migration patterns of many animals, birds and most notably, caribou. The caribou herds equal food security for many of the people in the far north.

Most of the herds are in a drastic decline. And this is broadly attributed to habitat loss and to climate change, because the warming of the Arctic causes another phenomenon called greening of the Arctic. The last time I went to the Arctic, I was amid the western Arctic caribou herd. And that herd used to be half a million strong. The latest census puts them at 152,000. 

Beavers have come to the Arctic. Beavers were never found in the Arctic prior to 1980. And in just this one portion of northwestern Alaska that I traveled through, through aerial photography, they counted over 11,000 new beaver dams in Arctic Alaska. Red foxes have begun to move north of tree line. There are more moose, and salmon are beginning to spawn in places they’d never spawn before as the waters have warmed.

You visited several Indigenous villages throughout Alaska and in other parts of the far north. What are some of your observations from them? 

The first time I was alerted to the changing north was in 1997. I was in a hunting camp in the Beaufort Sea in Canada, and an elder told me that they were starting to see robins and bluebirds, which they’ve never seen in their village before. And they’d just started to see salmon, and they were having mosquitoes come to their village. And I guess it was a breezy place, and it it stopped being breezy.

They used to have sled dog races on the 4th of July. They could no longer hold sled dog races in the summertime, because there was no longer any snow in the summer. It had gotten so warm. 

As a writer who has written books on the national parks, on Denali Mountain and others, what drew you to nature writing? 

I’ve always been an environmentalist at heart. I read the works of Rachel Carson and Edward Abbey and Peter Matheson and realized that nature is defenseless in that it doesn’t have a voice to speak for itself.

This issue of climate change is just the one grave environmental issue, perhaps the greatest of them all, right up there with overpopulation, that we need to be alert to and that we need to make the public aware of.

Your most recent trip was with your son. Looking to the future, what might people see a hundred years from now in Alaska? What are your hopes? 

Alaska has always been perceived as the last frontier, and I think that’s still true today. And I would hope it’s true a century from now. Thanks to Jimmy Carter and the Alaska National Interest Lands Claims Act that he signed in 1980, we have an enormous amount of protected wilderness and public lands in Alaska.

But that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t continue to speak up for it and defend it. But I think that I’m optimistic and hopeful about the future of Alaska, because of all its protected wildlands.