Kivalina sits on a narrow barrier island between the Chukchi Sea and Kivalina Lagoon, about 79 miles (127 km) northwest of Kotzebue and 72 miles (116 km) southeast of Point Hope, Alaska. Lieutenant Lavrentiy Zagoskin of the Imperial Russian Navy first recorded the Iñupiat village, then called “Kivualinagmut” and situated at the lagoon’s north end, in 1847. The lagoon runs about 10 miles (16 km) and is fed by the Kivalina and Wulik rivers. Singauk Entrance links the lagoon to the Chukchi Sea. The modern village occupies the island’s southeastern tip, right at this entrance, where the Wulik River empties into the sea; it is one of only two outlets from the lagoon, and its shifting sandbars and chronic erosion have long shaped, and shrunk, the ground the village stands on.

Kivalina has long served as a waypoint for travelers along the Chukchi coast. In 2009 archaeologists found remains and artifacts from the Ipiutak culture, a pre-Thule, non-whaling civilization that vanished more than 1,000 years ago. Kivalina is one of 11 Alaska communities recognized by the Alaska Eskimo Whaling Commission that hunt the bowhead whale: Kaktovik, Nuiqsut, Utqiaġvik, Wainwright, Point Lay and Point Hope along the Chukchi and Beaufort coasts; Little Diomede and Wales in the Bering Strait region; and Savoonga and Gambell on St. Lawrence Island. Around 1900, after commercial whaling and walrus hunting had depleted local marine-mammal stocks, reindeer were imported from Siberia and some residents trained as herders. An airstrip was built in 1960, and a new school and electric system followed in the 1970s.

Arctic temperatures are rising more than twice as fast as the global average, fueling fiercer ocean storms, flooding and erosion beneath Kivalina’s homes. Sea ice that once shielded the island from winter storms now forms too late in the fall to block storm surges and rising water, and patchy ice makes winter travel and hunting more dangerous. Residents voted in 1992 to relocate the village, but agreeing on a safer site has proved difficult: a location chosen in 2000 was later ruled unsuitable by the Army Corps of Engineers. In the meantime, several beach-protection projects, including a 2010 rock revetment, have slowed the erosion, buying the community roughly another decade to find a new home. Read more here and here. Explore more of Kivalina and Singauk Entrance here: