Canadian University Study Finds Climate Change Affecting Alaska, Western Arctic River Channels

Climate change is one of many issues dividing party lines in the country. But where there’s smoke, there’s fire (no pun intended), and warming conditions have reportedly affected different wildlife and fish species and multiple regions in Alaska.

The latest potential impacts were chronicled in a Canadian study by the University of British Columbia Okanagan that suggests climate change has affected Western Arctic (Canada and Alaska) river flows. Here’s a sample of the data:

A team of international researchers monitoring the impact of climate change on large rivers in Arctic Canada and Alaska determined that, as the region is sharply warming up, its rivers are not moving as scientists have expected.

Dr. Alessandro Ielpi, an Assistant Professor with UBC Okanagan’s Irving K. Barber Faculty of Science, is a landscape scientist and lead author of a paper published this week in Nature Climate Change. The research, conducted with Dr. Mathieu Lapôtre at Stanford University, along with Dr. Alvise Finotello at the University of Padua in Italy, and Université Laval’s Dr. Pascale Roy-Léveillée, examines how atmospheric warming is affecting Arctic rivers flowing through permafrost terrain.

Their findings, says Dr. Ielpi, were a bit surprising.

“The western Arctic is one of the areas in the world experiencing the sharpest atmospheric warming due to climate change,” he says. “Many northern scientists predicted the rivers would be destabilized by atmospheric warming. The understanding was that as permafrost thaws, riverbanks are weakened, and therefore northern rivers are less stable and expected to shift their channel positions at a faster pace.”