This column is provided as a public service by the Geophysical Institute, University of Alaska Fairbanks, in cooperation with the UAF research community. Ned Rozell is a science writer at the institute.
Experts say it is hard to measure mankind's current suffering as a result of climate change.
However, they do know that Alaska was once the setting for an environmental shift so dramatic it forced people to evacuate the entire North Slope, according to Michael Kunz, an archaeologist with the Bureau of Land Management. About 10,000 years ago, a community of people lived on Alaska's North Slope, the treeless tundra that extends north from the Brooks Range to the sea. These people, known as Paleoindians, used a thick backbone of rock west of the Colville River as a hunting lookout. Kunz first discovered stone spear tips at the site, known as the Mesa, in 1978. The people of the Mesa lived at a time when the Arctic was undergoing a change not unlike the changes some scientists are documenting today.