On March 21, a team of researchers left Bethel on a snowmachine expedition across the western and northern coasts of Alaska.
The project is called Collaborative Observations of the Arctic Shorezone: a Traverse for Knowledge eXchange, or COAST-X for short. It comes out of the University of Alaska Fairbanks (UAF)'s Institute of Northern Engineering and its team aims to meet with communities to discuss environmental changes.
Researchers Benjamin Jones and Phillip Wilson began their 1,600 mile traverse from Bethel to Utqiaġvik, roughly tracing the shores of the Yukon-Kuskokwim (Y-K) Delta and Norton Sound, as well as the Bering Strait and Chukchi Sea coasts.
They’ll spend time in over a dozen communities along the way. The goal of the expedition is to collect locals’ lived experience regarding changes in sea ice, permafrost, and shoreline erosion in their respective regions. The project aims to “amplify indigenous experience” and plans to meet observational reports with their own data and research tools. The researchers also intend to spend time in community schools.
The COAST-X team will share updates on their blog along with a real-time tracker as they move northward.
The project is supported by both local and national collaborators, including the National Science Foundation via UAF’s ACTION project and the United States Army Corps of Engineers Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory.
