USA: Global Warming

SHISHMAREF, AK - APRIL 15: The modest wood crosses near the Shishmaref church point to one of the many problematic aspects of the village's impending forced relocation: the Inupiat Eskimos, for whom elders are highly repected, will have to decide wether to move their graves, or move on without them, April 15, 2005 in Shishmaref, Alaska, USA. Located on the small island of Sarichef off the coast of Alaska near the Artic circle, Shishmaref, population 591, is a century old Inupiat Eskimo village whose economy depends partly on subsistence fishing and hunting. Shishmaref will have to be evacuated within the next nine years because of global worming. Climate change has caused the Chukchi sea, which surrounds the island, not to freeze before the arrival of the fierce fall storms, as it has for centuries, leaving the island unprotected. In the last ten years, hundreds of feet of shore as well as several houses have been lost to the stroms. Eighteen houses also had to be moved away from the edge of the island, to which scientists have given another nine years. Poised to become the world's first global warming refugees, Shishmaref's Inupiat Eskimos are struggling for their survival: the government would like to move them to the suburbs of the city of Nome, where the villagers fear that their traditional lifestyle will be lost. Instead, Shishmaref's inhabitants want to setttle in Tin Creek, an isolated, undevelloped location some sixteen miles away, a more expensive endeavor, whose cost has been estimated at more than 180 millions. (Photo by Gilles Mingasson/Getty Images)