Climate Action
Alaska is America’s Living Laboratory for Climate Change
October 18, 2025
Every year on October 18, Alaska Day commemorates the 1867 transfer of Alaska from Russia to the United States — but Alaska’s significance has evolved far beyond that moment in history. Today, it serves as a living laboratory for climate science, a place where melting glaciers, thawing permafrost, and changing ecosystems offer a glimpse into the Earth’s future.
Across its vast landscape — spanning 663,300 square miles — Alaska compresses global environmental challenges into one dramatic microcosm. Its mountains, tundra, and coastlines reveal how warming transforms not just local communities, but the entire planet. Scientists from around the world travel there to study these transformations, and their findings are reshaping what we know about climate change.
Here are some of the lessons the world is learning from Alaska, the frontline of a changing planet.
Glaciers are the Planet’s Thermometers
Alaska’s glaciers are among the fastest-melting in the world, losing about 66.7 billion tonnes of ice each year as of 2021. If all of Alaska’s glacier ice were to melt, the resulting meltwater would contribute approximately 46.4 mm to global sea-level rise. Glaciers around the world are vanishing faster than scientists can study them with 40% – 90% projected to disappear by the end of the century if current warming trends continue.
Glaciers act as natural climate records with each layer of compacted snow containing trapped air bubbles that can reveal what Earth’s atmosphere was like in the past. Ice cores, cylindrical samples of ice drilled from ice sheets or glaciers, act much like tree rings because they provide records of past environmental conditions. When scientists drill ice cores, they can track carbon dioxide levels, volcanic activity, and temperature shifts over thousands of years.
In August 2025, the rapid melting of Alaska’s Mendenhall Glacier led to the formation of a meltwater lake known locally as Suicide Basin, near Juneau. This ice-dammed basin periodically overflows as meltwater builds up and forces its way beneath the thinning glacier, which is losing roughly 100-150 feet of ice each year. When the pressure becomes too great, the basin drains suddenly, triggering destructive floods downstream. Because the sides of the lake are fragile, this sudden release can sweep up large amounts of sediment, posing a threat to buildings and infrastructure.
Sea ice and glaciers help keep the Earth cool by reflecting sunlight back into space, reducing the amount of heat absorbed by the planet. Without this reflective surface, the exposed water absorbs more heat, warming further and causing more ice to melt — a self-reinforcing cycle. The retreat of glaciers and the flooding of Alaska’s Mendenhall River serve as stark warnings of the global consequences of climate change. As these massive ice formations shrink, they accelerate sea-level rise, threaten the livelihoods and safety of coastal communities, and disrupt ocean circulation patterns that regulate the planet’s climate.
Thawing Permafrost = Unlocks Carbon
An estimated 85% of Alaska’s land is covered by permafrost — frozen ground that stores about twice as much carbon as is currently present in Earth’s entire atmosphere
When permafrost thaws, it releases carbon dioxide and methane, two potent greenhouse gases that intensify global warming. Researchers from the University of Alaska Fairbanks stated that the current thaw rates are accelerating. In just a few decades, previously solid ground has subsided into “thermokarst” landscapes that are uneven, soggy terrain where forests tilt and collapse.
This thawing sets up a self-reinforcing feedback loop: warming causes permafrost to melt, which releases massive stores of greenhouse gases (CO₂ and methane). Those emissions further warm the climate, accelerating permafrost degradation in a cycle known as the permafrost carbon–climate feedback. Given the vast carbon reservoirs locked in Arctic soils, many scientists warn this is one of Earth’s potential tipping points and Alaska’s rapidly changing landscapes provide a clear warning of how close we may be to crossing it.
Adapt or Die
Melting permafrost and the significant loss of reflective snow and ice, which leads to less sunlight being reflected and more heat being absorbed, a phenomenon also known as Arctic Amplification, is driving massive change in the region on many levels.
Alaska’s ecosystems and its people are adapting faster than almost anywhere else in the world. As the Arctic warms 3.5 times the global average, climate change is disrupting animal populations, and entire food webs are reorganizing.
For instance, salmon are now moving into rivers that were previously too cold to support them, altering local ecosystems. Yet even as their range expands, overall salmon populations are declining, which is disrupting Indigenous fishing patterns that have been practiced for centuries. The same warming that shifts salmon habits is also thawing permafrost, destabilizing infrastructure — from homes to pipelines — and forcing towns like Newtok to relocate.
Another example is the changing migration patterns of bowhead whales. As sea ice recedes, these whales are delaying their migrations. Once reliant on the Bering Sea’s winter feeding grounds, many now remain in the Chukchi and Beaufort Seas year-round, adapting their diets as the shifting ice affects the availability of krill and zooplankton. What’s happening in Alaska offers a glimpse of the environmental, economic, and social transformations that other regions may face in the coming decades.
Alaska’s Lessons
Alaska is no longer just America’s last frontier but the world’s first warning system. Its glaciers, permafrost, and ecosystems are teaching us that climate change isn’t a distant threat but a present reality. The data collected in Alaska informs climate models used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and guides global policy decisions.
As scientists often say: what happens in Alaska doesn’t stay in Alaska. The state’s landscapes, rich in both beauty and evidence, reveal the story of a planet in transition and reminds us that the choices we make now will determine how that story ends.
What happens here matters to people everywhere.
Matthew Sturm, Arctic scientist, snow and ice researcher at the Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory, Fort Wainwright
Our precious living laboratory is under threat now more than ever. Ironically new fossil fuel drilling projects are planned across Alaska — already one of the most climate-vulnerable regions on Earth. These developments risk accelerating environmental damage further in a place that offers critical insights into our planet’s future.
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