Above: Kanakanak Hospital sits above an eroding bluff in this photo taken by an unmanned aerial vehicle May 28, 2021, in Dillingham. UAF/GI photos and video footage by Chris Maio unless otherwise noted.
The waves of the Nushagak River are hungry at the edge of Dillingham, the largest community in the Bristol Bay region of Alaska. They eat several feet of the soft ground each year, driven by storms that have grown more aggressive and frequent as the climate warms and annual sea ice becomes less extensive.
Houses collapse and tumble down eroding bluffs. Sewage lagoons and a hospital sit not far from the advancing shoreline.
Bodies of victims of the 1918 influenza pandemic have been emerging from a mass grave as the ground gives way to the storms.
Many communities along Alaska’s vast coastline, the longest in the nation, have been battling erosion and flooding problems for years. In the Bristol Bay region, residents have been getting help from University of Alaska Fairbanks students. Since 2016 they have trudged through mud and scrambling over debris of slumping bluffs to gather data to help communities respond.
They will visit several Bristol Bay communities again this year.
The students’ research is building a powerful resource for understanding and managing the erosion, which can be caused by forces such as natural water channel movement, heavy snowmelt runoff and a warming climate that thaws permafrost, reduces sea ice and brings more and stronger storms.
“The data that we’re collecting is usually the only data that exists for these areas,” said associate professor Chris Maio, who oversees the research at the Arctic Coastal Geoscience Lab of the UAF Geophysical Institute and teaches in the UAF College of Natural Science and Mathematics.
The work by Maio and the students adds to knowledge of Alaska Native elders and others about coastal changes and provides key information for making better-informed community decisions. Tribal environmental coordinators participate in the research.
Filling the data gap
Maio illustrates the work’s importance by pointing to Dillingham, where the Nushagak River eats vigorously at the bluff and threatens infrastructure.
“It’s catastrophic. There’s houses falling in,” he said. “It was actually startling.”
Erosion just up from the river’s mouth has brought the bluff edge to about 120 feet from the sewage lagoon of Kanakanak Hospital, which serves the wider Bristol Bay region. Nearly 7 feet of land falls away annually.
Above: A brief drone video records the face of an eroding cliff near homes in Dillingham.
A few miles upriver from the hospital, the Dillingham city sewage lagoon is just under 400 feet from the shoreline, which is eroding at a much faster rate of about 20 feet per year. That much can sometimes be lost through a single storm, as was the case in August 2018.
“We’ve documented the annual changes occurring in front of the Dillingham sewage lagoon, and that’s helping them to decide what they have to do,” Maio said. “They have to spend millions.”
“We have an erosion monitoring site there that has given us time-lapse images from every hour for five years,” he said. “We really zoom in on these hotspot areas.”
The team’s work is filling a big gap in data. They have put out wave buoys and plan to install water level gauges.
“The absence of data is a big issue,” Maio said. “It’s a big problem because you can’t do a lot of planning if you don’t know what the tides are doing and what the wave regime is.”
Data obtained by Maio and the students bolsters a community’s grant proposals and gives engineers a head start in other project phases.
“There’s no other source of data where you can say a quantifiable amount of erosion has happened,” said Roberta Glenn, a master’s student in geography who also interns with the Alaska Division of Geological and Geophysical Surveys and has spent three summers doing fieldwork with the division and the UAF lab. “There’s a lack of baseline coastal data.”
“Communities will take the erosion data and go to a grant-funding organization or an engineering firm and say, ‘This is where it’s eroding, and we need help’,” she said. “If they didn’t have the data, then all they have is their word or anecdotal evidence, which isn’t always enough for engineering assessments.”
A growing program
Maio and Jacquelyn Overbeck of the Division of Geological and Geophysical Surveys co-lead the project, which began in 2016.
After workshops and meetings across the Bristol Bay area, the team installed wooden stakes and time-lapse cameras in Dillingham, Levelock, Port Heiden and Togiak and trained residents to record observations.
In 2017, researchers set up monitoring locations in six more communities: Aleknagik, Chignik Lagoon, Chignik Lake, Ekuk, Pilot Point and New Stuyahok.
The program has since expanded to include more than 20 communities. The Arctic Coastal Geoscience Lab focuses on the Bristol Bay region, and the Division of Geological and Geophysical Surveys works in the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta and on the North Slope. Funding comes from the state, the National Science Foundation, Alaska Sea Grant and, via local tribal environmental programs, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Other partners are the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs, the Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium and Bristol Bay Native Association.
“Climate change is affecting the Bristol Bay region, with erosion impacting our infrastructure, culture, fishing, and burial sites,” said CaSandera Johnson, environmental program manager for Bristol Bay Native Association. “The outcomes of this collaboration, such as erosion mapping and hazard assessments, will be used to secure funding to address erosion impacts.”
Community involvement
Obtaining data starts with the first meeting between the erosion program’s staff and local residents.
Maio makes three points in those meetings.
“One is I’m just a scientist who is really curious about how things are changing and happy to get the opportunity to measure something that someone has never measured before,” he said. “I always bring out that selfish science motive right away.
“Another motive is that I want my students to engage with rural communities to do not just science but science with a meaning behind it,” he said. “The third thing is to address the priorities of the tribe. Do they need maps that identify erosion areas? Do they need a way for some of their staff to get a better education? Do they need a water level gauge? We’re trying to address those priorities.”
Glenn, who spent time in Port Heiden and Levelock last year, said community residents have come to know many of the returning students and other researchers and offer valuable updates during repeat site visits.
“Everyone knows everyone by now, and we’re having a good time out on the beach laughing and catching up,” Glenn said. “Someone will say ‘Some of these stakes were wiped out in the last storm,’ and then they’ll help us install new stakes.”
“You have to have a good relationship with the community to do the work,” she said. “I think that the lab has done a really good job of building those relationships.”
The relationship-building extends to the schools, where Maio and others are helping develop a science curriculum about the erosion and flooding hazards.
“We want to teach the students how to be scientists,” he said. We want them to learn about what we’re doing and how we do it and inspire them to follow in our footprints.”
A muddy job
The research requires not only high-tech equipment but also some old-style items such as wooden stakes.
And good boots.
Grad student Reyce Bogardus, pursuing a Ph.D. in geoscience, said one of the most important tools for data-gathering is real-time kinematic GPS, which consists of a base station unit and a second, and different, “rover” GPS antenna.
The base station works with the rover GPS unit to calculate and adjust for influences brought about by the ionosphere and atmosphere on the satellite signals they receive. The base station then sends this corrected data about its latitude, longitude, and elevation in real-time to the rover GPS unit, resulting in 3D locational data accurate to the centimeter.
Then, using a time series of water level heights measured from a gauge, the data is manually adjusted to make it relative to the local ocean or river surface.
“And that’s extremely important if we actually are assessing flooding,” he said.
They also do a lot of footwork.
“We collect data on the linear position of the shoreline, literally walking along a specific feature of the coast,” he said. “The power of that is that you get a very accurate measurement of change by repeating that over multiple years.
“And we do beach profiles, which is going perpendicular over the beach,” he said. “So we can get horizontal and vertical rates of erosion.”
They also use unmanned aerial vehicles to make hundreds of photographs that are then stitched together and converted to make 3D elevation models. Those models can be presented through virtual reality so that local residents can more easily determine potential problems such as erosion threatening a sewage lagoon.
“That’s the powerful part of UAV surveying,” Bogardus said.
Lasting impact
At Pilot Point, a village about 100 miles south of Dillingham, erosion eats away at a road to a shoreline bulkhead where commercial fishermen unload their catches. Erosion also undermines the bulkhead itself.
Above: A brief drone video shows how erosion has destroyed a road by a building at Pilot Point.
UAF students have been gathering data about that land loss and offering other engineering services.
A 2021 report by the Division of Geological and Geophysical Surveys said the shoreline near Dago Creek, near where the bulkhead is located, has crept inland almost 600 feet in 66 years through 2019, an average of 9 feet annually. Erosion undermined the bulkhead as recently as 2019, the report states.
The division’s 60-year erosion forecast for the access road determined that 3,500 feet of the road will be exposed to erosion through 2079, with half of that exposure occurring by 2039. It estimates replacement cost of the bulkhead and exposed road and boardwalk at about $4 million.
The small community has had to make significant repairs to the road for the past two years to move fishing boats and barge cargo to and from the bulkhead and to keep it in shape for a proposed seafood processing plant.
Residents worry about sliding off the road, according to a 2018 report prepared by the Bristol Bay Native Association.
That could change. Work by Maio, his students and others has jump-started road engineering, feasibility and design studies by the Army Corps of Engineers and the U.S. Department of Transportation, said Daniel Kingsley, project consultant for the Pilot Point Tribal Council.
“Without these valuable baseline data studies by the Geophysical Institute and historical erosion maps generated by the state Division of Geological and Geophysical Surveys, our community would not have attracted these federal funding agencies’ attention in such short order,” he said.
It’s an outcome that Maio said isn’t limited to Pilot Point.
“Other communities obtained funding to bring engineers in to do more testing when our products went into their proposals,” he said.
Above: A video produced by Alaska Sea Grant documents some of the erosion assessment work that Chris Maio and students are conducting in Alaska’s coastal communities.