Collapsing landscapes How climate change is tearing apart an Arctic isle

Last summer, the western Arctic was uncomfortably hot. Smoke from Canada's wildfires hung thick in the air, and swarms of mosquitoes searched for exposed skin.

- Leyland Cecco

It was a maddening combination that left researchers on Qikiqtaruk, an island off the north coast of the Yukon, desperate for relief.

And so on a late July afternoon, a team of Canadian scientists dived into the Beaufort Sea, bobbing and splashing in a sheltered bay for nearly two hours. Later, as they lay sprawled on a beach, huge chunks of the island they were studying slid into the ocean.

"The land was giving us hints of what was to come," said Richard Gordon, a senior ranger. "Days before, we found all these puddles of clear water. But it hadn't rained at all in days; you look up and see nothing but blue sky.

"Now we know: all of that ice in the permafrost had melted. The signs were there. We just didn't know."

Over the next two weeks, the landslides happened again and again.

Throughout the small island, the tundra sheared off in more than 700 different locations. Some collapses were quick, soil ripping from the land with a damp thunderclap. Others were slow, with land "rippling and rolling like a carpet" down the slope, said Isla Myers-Smith, an ecology professor at the University of British Columbia.

In one case, the team were devastated to learn that one of their monitoring sites, where the data they collected had given a three decade-long glimpse into the island's shifting ecology, had vanished into the ocean.

"Each time you lose a dataset, you lose understanding of how the island is changing," said Myers-Smith. "It's hard not to get emotionally invested in the work you do and in this place because you know you're studying and witnessing irreversible changes."

For more than a decade, MyersSmith and her "Team Shrub" graduate students have studied those dramatic changes unfolding on Qikiqtaruk (also known as Herschel Island).