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Research team seeks answers from a changing river

Dan Gillikin surveyed the view from his front window and didn’t like what he saw.

The Aniak River, which runs alongside his house, was a jumble of car-sized chunks of ice. Breakup on the nearby Kuskokwim River had pushed a frozen snarl down the Aniak, making it impassable.

“I’m basically looking at Armageddon right now,” he said, describing the scene by phone in early May.

Before Gillikin bought an old homestead at the mouth of the Aniak River about 15 years ago, he wondered how isolated the property would become each spring from the nearby village of Aniak. Locals said he could count on being stranded for 3-5 days while the river transitioned from ice to water.

“Well, that happened the first few years I’ve been out here, and it hasn’t happened since,” he said. “I’ve been stuck out here for three weeks, maybe a month. That seems to be the trend lately.”

It’s part of a growing new reality in Southwest �ֻ�ֱ��, where a shifting climate is bringing big, sudden changes to the Kuskokwim River and the people who rely on it. A team led by �ֻ�ֱ�� researcher Steve Dykstra is working with the Native Village of Napaimute to better understand how those changes are unfolding.

Dykstra, an assistant professor at UAF’s College of Fisheries and Ocean Sciences, studies the dynamics between oceans and rivers. On the Kuskokwim, those interactions are enormous and mostly undocumented. The 700-mile artery features the longest stretch of tide-influenced river in the U.S. Tides push as far upriver as Tuluksak, about 125 river miles inland from the mouth of the Kuskokwim at the Bering Sea.

Two recent typhoons, Halong and Merbok, highlighted the devastating impacts of flooding and erosion on coastal communities in the region. But as storms become more frequent and intense, their influence on villages along the Kuskokwim has also amplified.

Under some circumstances, Dykstra said, storm surges can get larger as they go inland. Bethel, about 65 river miles from the sea, had bigger surges during Merbok than those found in Kuskokwim Bay.

“We often think that the inland communities are distant from marine hazards,” Dykstra said. “In reality, they’re right in the middle of them.”

During the past two years, Dykstra and oceanography graduate student Eli Gomez have set up dozens of monitoring stations along the Kuskokwim. Some of the stations trace eroding riverbanks as fine silt is carried away with each storm. Sensing devices are moored to the river bottom in various locations to record water levels, salinity and temperature.

Dykstra and Gomez hope the information they collect will provide a better understanding of a river that has received little formal study. Napakiak, just downstream from Bethel, is losing about 40 feet of shoreline each year, endangering the village building by building. Inland communities have had their drinking water tainted by intruding saltwater. Sometimes the river beneath the ice in Bethel runs backward during a storm.

In some cases, the storms have delivered knockout blows. Residents of Kipnuk voted to relocate after their community was pummeled by Typhoon Halong last October. Understanding a river system is particularly important when considering factors like a new village site, Gomez said.

“Things like flood modeling depend on knowing the geometry of the system, and that’s changing rapidly,” he said. “It would be devastating and prohibitively expensive to relocate your village only to have to relocate it again in 20 years.”

The Native Village of Napaimute wants better data about the river because it’s hired by the state to maintain an ice road on the Kuskokwim each winter. The road, which this year was a frozen 350-mile path from Tuntutuliak to Crooked Creek, is a remarkable feat of engineering even under good conditions. 

Later freeze-ups and unexpected breakup events have added another degree of difficulty, said Gillikin, the Napaimute natural resources director and owner of the homestead near Aniak. After particularly warm mid-winter Chinooks, the refrozen river resembles a field of giant Lego blocks.

“That makes the ice stronger,” Gillikin said, “but it sure makes it hard to make a road.”

Sometimes a determined crew can find a way. After spending another week unable to get his boat through a wall of ice to open water, Gillikin got an assist from his co-workers in Aniak. 

“Luckily, my crew in town felt sorry for me and shuttled a boat out to me,” he said in a follow-up email. “Darn it, guess they want me to come into work.”

Since the late 1970s, the �ֻ�ֱ��' Geophysical Institute has provided this column free in cooperation with the UAF research community. Jeff Richardson is the communications manager for the UAF College of Fisheries and Ocean Sciences.