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" A few years back, in the course of researching a book, I found myself in what became one of my favorite places on earth \u2014 a barrier island in Alaska called Shishmaref, which us gradually being devoured by the Chukchi Sea. There are two reasons for this. The first is that the sea doesn&amp;#039;t freeze as early, or stay frozen as long, as it once did and, since the Chukchi Sea is where most of the cyclonic Pacific storms end up, rather than expending themselves over ice, they bash around in the unfrozen water until they run out of steam, busting up Shishmaref as they do. The second reason is that the permafrost on Shishmaref is disappearing, and what&amp;#039;s left is hardly worthy of the name. Therefore, the dying typhoons rip big chunks of the island out to sea with them. Those are the two reasons Shishmaref is disappearing. There is one reason that those two phenomena are occurring, however, and that is climate change. The warming of the Earth is killing off the permafrost, and that does more than make life miserable for the people of Shishmaref, and for the Arctic peoples in general. As it happens, when the permafrost melts, because it is composed of dead plant and animal matter, it starts giving off CO2 at a devastating rate, completing a neat little circle of planetary damage that feeds off itself. Just this week, the National Academy Of Science published the findings of a new study of the effects of the disappearing permafrost, and how the Earth is being converted into the world&amp;#039;s largest self-cleaning oven. Not only is the losss of the permafrost an ecological catastrophe for the Arctic, it also is accelerating the ecological cataclysm of climate change at a rate that is faster than even the author&amp;#039;s of the study anticipated. &amp;quot;What we can say now is that regardless of how fast the thawing of the Arctic permafrost occurs, the conversion of this soil carbon to carbon dioxide and its release into the atmosphere will be faster than we previously thought,&amp;quot; senior author George Kling, a University of Michigan ecologist and aquatic biogeochemist, said in a statement. The one thing I remember best about Shishmaref is how bright and numerous were the stars over the sea. There will come a time when there is no land there on which anyone can stand and look at them. Maybe some people don&amp;#039;t care about that, but I do, because maybe one day the same will be able to be said about Cape Cod.  "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a19470/the-end-of-the-permafrost/>