The World’s Largest Freezer Is Melting

If you live in northern Alaska, you don't really need a freezer. With outside temperatures frequently below zero degrees Fahrenheit, preserving meat outside seems like a no-brainer.

For generations, Native communities in Alaska, Northern Canada, and Russia have been using cellars to store the meat caught from hunting for local whale, walrus, seal, caribou, and fish. With permafrost covering large parts of the Alaskan wilderness, the easiest, and most effective, way of keeping all of that meat bacteria-free is by digging a hole and keeping it in underground meat cellars.

So, why then, are Native Alaskan communities finding sludge in their meat cellars in the middle of winter? The main culprit is—you guessed it—climate change.

According to a recent report by National Geographic, it would appear that the temperature in Northern climates is increasing not only in our atmosphere, but also 20 feet below the Earth's surface. While air temperature has risen by five degrees since the 1950s, the temperature below the ground has gone up by two to three degrees Fahrenheit in the same period. In other words, permafrost—the world's largest freezer—is slowly turning into permaslush in many parts of the Arctic.

This increase of two or three degrees may sound tiny and incremental, but it's causing a lot of headaches for Native populations across Alaska who live in an already brutal climate and rely on frost to preserve their food.

"Maintaining ice cellars is a ton of hard work in the best of times, so one reason why freezers may be used more now is that walk-in freezers are available. And folks have more money and less off-work time than 40 years ago," Craig George, a biologist with the North Slope Borough told National Geographic.

Practical considerations aside, the slow melt is also affecting centuries-old traditions for Native groups like Alaska's Inupiat. "For the Inupiat the loss of ice cellars is not trivial, for ice cellars are a crucial element of Inupiat subsistence way of life," a separate report found. That same study also found that meat cellars have spiritual significance to many Native Alaskan groups, quoting a young Inupiat girl; "You have to clean out your ice cellar cause the whale won't give itself unless it has a clean place to rest."

Local fishermen, who rely heavily on fishing, will frequently catch whales that can yield close to 50 tons each. Needless to say, your run-of-the-mill kitchen freezer is not going to cut if for storage, which is why meat cellars (the past tense is being used increasingly when talking about meat cellars) provided such a simple and ecological means of storage.

Forced with this new reality, many whalers in communities like Barrow, Alaska, are being forced to share walk-in freezers with scientists from the Naval Arctic Research Laboratory instead of getting chest freezers delivered by cargo ships. But these more modern forms of freezing are affecting the taste, local hunter David Brower told National Geographic; "The cellar allows the slow aging of the meat you can't get in a freezer. It's a different taste and a break from our heritage."

Once again, global warming has reared its ugly head and proven that you can actually taste climate change.