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Into the Thaw: Witnessing Wonder Amid Arctic Climate Chaos
An award-winning author and photographer returns to the Arctic to document the effects of climate change.
Forty years ago, the park ranger Jon Waterman took his first journey into the Alaskan Arctic, to the Noatak headwaters. He was astonished by the abundant wildlife, the strange landscape, and its otherworldly light—how the “frequent rain showers glow like lemonade poured out of the sky.” Taken with a new sense of wonder, he began to explore the North.
After a 30-year absence from the Noatak, he returned with his son. Amid a now-flooded river missing the once-plentiful caribou, he was shocked and heartbroken by the changes. The following year, in 2022, he took one final journey “into the thaw” to document—for this lushly illustrated and scholarly book—the environmental and cultural changes wrought by the climate crisis.
A widely published author and photographer, Waterman’s narrative alternates between adventure and wilderness memoir and plainly stated natural history of the area. Chased by bears, sometimes alone for weeks on end amid hordes of mosquitoes, he notes the extraordinary changes from 1983 until the present brush grown over the tundra in a phenomenon called Greening of the Arctic, tear-drop-shaped landslide thaw slumps—a.k.a. thermokarsts—caused by thawing permafrost, and an increasing loss of sea ice as he travels along the Chukchi and Beaufort Seas. The author also spends time with the kindhearted, welcoming Inuit or Inupiat most affected by the Arctic crisis, who share how their age-old culture has attempted to cope with “the thaw.” Stricken by the change, Waterman paints an intimate portrait of both the villages and the little-visited landscape, because “it’s high time that we truly understand the Arctic.” He writes, “Lest we forget what it once was.”
Through his quest for wonder—in prose illuminated by humility and humor—Waterman shows how the Arctic can confer grace on those who pass through. Despite the unfolding crisis, as a narrative of hope, at the book’s end he suggests actions we can all take to slow the thaw and preserve what is left of this remarkable, vast frontier.
Forty years ago, the park ranger Jon Waterman took his first journey into the Alaskan Arctic, to the Noatak headwaters. He was astonished by the abundant wildlife, the strange landscape, and its otherworldly light—how the “frequent rain showers glow like lemonade poured out of the sky.” Taken with a new sense of wonder, he began to explore the North.
After a 30-year absence from the Noatak, he returned with his son. Amid a now-flooded river missing the once-plentiful caribou, he was shocked and heartbroken by the changes. The following year, in 2022, he took one final journey “into the thaw” to document—for this lushly illustrated and scholarly book—the environmental and cultural changes wrought by the climate crisis.
A widely published author and photographer, Waterman’s narrative alternates between adventure and wilderness memoir and plainly stated natural history of the area. Chased by bears, sometimes alone for weeks on end amid hordes of mosquitoes, he notes the extraordinary changes from 1983 until the present brush grown over the tundra in a phenomenon called Greening of the Arctic, tear-drop-shaped landslide thaw slumps—a.k.a. thermokarsts—caused by thawing permafrost, and an increasing loss of sea ice as he travels along the Chukchi and Beaufort Seas. The author also spends time with the kindhearted, welcoming Inuit or Inupiat most affected by the Arctic crisis, who share how their age-old culture has attempted to cope with “the thaw.” Stricken by the change, Waterman paints an intimate portrait of both the villages and the little-visited landscape, because “it’s high time that we truly understand the Arctic.” He writes, “Lest we forget what it once was.”
Through his quest for wonder—in prose illuminated by humility and humor—Waterman shows how the Arctic can confer grace on those who pass through. Despite the unfolding crisis, as a narrative of hope, at the book’s end he suggests actions we can all take to slow the thaw and preserve what is left of this remarkable, vast frontier.
311 pages, Kindle Edition
Published November 19, 2024
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July 25, 2025
Late in my seventh decade, I came to realize that I dove deep into the Arctic for an orientation absent from my life. I went to find gravitas and value in a place that concurrently frightened, fascinated, and touched me with its vastness, abundant light, and mountains-cum-relics of a long-vanished sea. I also…wanted my journeys through the Arctic to release me from my moribund introversions, as if the grandeur of what the Iñupiat refer to as the Great Earth and its Weather would somehow confer beauty and peace to my soul.
I am so thankful I learned that lesson (orientation to peace and beauty to my soul) aeons before my seventh decade, and I feel it on every inch of the planet, essentially, although there are truly ugly places on earth as well, that don’t convey peace as much as balance the peace with the knowledge it could all look like this, especially at the rate we are destroying the Earth. Books like these will be gargantuanly important then, when it is all gone, or only found in a few places on earth.
I am fascinated with a place that alternately resembles the lost world of the Pleistocene—gouged throughout by the ancient push of glaciers—then in the next moment is unexpectedly filled with weird spiders huddled on the side of their massive webs.
Kalulutok Creek would be called a river in most parts of the world. Here in Gates of the Arctic National Park and Preserve, amid the largest span of legislated wilderness in the United States, it’s just a creek compared to the massive Noatak River that we’re bound for. But in my mind—while we splash-walked packrafts and forded its depths at least thirty times yesterday—Kalulutok will always be an ice-cold, wild river. It drains the Endicott and Schwatka Mountains, which are filled with the most spectacular granite and limestone spires of the entire Brooks Range. One valley to the east of us is sky-lined with sharp, flinty peaks called the Arrigetch, or “fingers of the outstretched hand” in Iñupiaq.
The Arctic can be verdant in places and even look lush with ankle-high plants that flourish across summer-dampened permafrost. Yet the sparse annual precipitation makes many places arid. In the heart of the Brooks Range above 2,500 feet, Gates of the Arctic National Park and Preserve averages five to ten inches of precipitation a year, same as the Mojave Desert—with its sand dunes and sparse Joshua tree forests—in Southern California.
But amid the utter strangeness, the Arctic is scented with aged spices: the sweet turpentine of Labrador tea and the lilac perfume of the tiniest, most delicate pink twinflowers amid real bumblebees (not botflies) that gather pollen. The place is ribboned with rivers finned by peculiar and beautiful fish, playful ground squirrels chirp throughout, and the midnight sun burnishes the hillsides gold and makes the frequent rain showers glow like lemonade poured out of the sky. Beneath it all the active layer of permafrost tundra presents as a giant live body and holds forth an abundance of blueberries, bunchberries, crowberries, lingonberries, salmonberries, cranberries, and bearberries. So I have learned to swallow a bit of discomfort. To take deep breaths and let the landscape open my heart and fire my imagination like no place on Earth.
As the sun sinks below the horizon in August and night returns, in a curious continuity with the brilliant summer light show, solar winds blow particles into the upper atmosphere. This enlivens the night sky with colorful evanescence: gauzy saffron clouds and beams of viridescent and roseate flickers. The mysterious northern lights were named (by the astronomer Galileo four hundred years ago) after the Greek goddess Aurora, who flew through the sky to announce the dawn, and Borealis, the god of the north wind. Beneath the lights on a cold, still night in the wilderness even jaded skeptics can become Arctic Believers.
Although no creature moved within visible distance of the tent, the northern lights blazed above me in a brilliant green shimmery set of curtains that crinkled open and shut as if a bear panted and swished and pushed through the knee-high dwarf birch and sedges. No way could I go back to sleep. Scientists have recently proved that you can hear the lights. They’ve been described as two pieces of silk that are rubbed together. Or, as some people (me, for instance) claim, like an animal that stalks you through the brush.
You can imagine most-ancient Alaska when you slog past a dark boulder embossed with whitened squiggly patterns of shells and dendritic arms that show how the region once lay under a shallow sea, broken by low rounded mountains. Back then, three hundred to four hundred million years ago, before the seven continents existed, life consisted of spineless invertebrates: coral, tiny-tentacled and shelled brachiopods, and the now-extinct, three-lobed trilobites. In a museum with the boulder as a canvas, the fossils could be perceived as minute art forms of remarkable symmetry, but on foot in the vastness of the far-flung Brooks Range you want to feel the sense of purpose in it all and understand eons of change. The fossils represent some of the earliest life on Earth, a glimmer of a miraculous evolution of single-celled organisms that fused into many-celled primitive animals as their body plans diversified and radiated. Eventually they exploded into an array of invertebrates that would someday mutate into larger creatures—millions of caribou, for example—constructed with spider-webbed catchments of neurons wired to lobed brains that would transform them into sentient souls. Or so you can imagine.
Glaciers in the Brooks Range dammed the principal Noatak River drainage. The glaciers held back a series of lakes, collectively called Noatak Lake by geologists. It stretched 1,700 square miles. The sheer weight of the glaciers physically depressed the land and lowered Howard Pass (now 2,200 feet above sea level) a thousand feet. For several millennia, the westward flow of the Noatak River shifted north out of Noatak Lake and over the Brooks Range through Howard Pass.
Iñupiat call the ground nuna; when the upper, active layer of ground refroze every fall, they would say, “Nuna qiqitkaa.” To refrigerate their meat, they simply dug deep into the nuna to build an ice cellar (siġluaq). Since the ground was always frozen several feet down below the active layer, to name their cold storage otherwise would have been a fool’s repetition. They wouldn’t call ice “cold.” But in recent years villagers can’t rely on siġluaqs because the permafrost thaw floods the cellars.
Back then, it all happened. So. Slowly. Until humans began to arrive in places like Alaska. And soon enough, our species quickly jumpstarted a new period of extinction. Since 1500, 881 animal species have gone extinct (due to pollution, development, and climate change—according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature). This explains why the Iñupiat say that "the Earth is moving much faster now." Compared to repeated prehistoric climate change (except for the meteorite that hit sixty-six million years ago), the pace of climate change since humans began to migrate across continents—mostly after the recent Industrial Revolution—has already begun with ominous meteoric speed.
Before human-caused climate change, one can best picture the ancient Arctic migrations from the Iñupiat village of Alaska’s Little Diomede Island (population 100). From there, it’s a little over two miles west over the wind-frothed, icy waters of the Bering Strait to Russia’s hilly Diomede Island (which fast-forwards the clock twenty hours across the International Date Line). And one of the best ways to understand the immensity of ancient Brooks Range glaciation is to float the Noatak River. Past its permafrost-exposed banks, you can try to gauge the distance across the glacier-plucked valley. Once afloat, amid the thaw and extinctions of the past, it’s not hard to imagine your kayak as a time machine. My journey into Arctic wonder began there thirty-nine years ago.
What we’ve learned since then, with knowledge from the Russians, is that permafrost underlies 15 percent of the ice or glacial-free zones of the Northern Hemisphere (or 11 percent of the globe’s surface, which includes Antarctic lands and high alpine mountains outside the Arctic). Eighty percent of Alaska is underlain by permafrost. This includes the most northerly continuous zone (29 percent of the state—essentially above the Arctic Circle), the discontinuous (35 percent), and sporadic or isolated (16 percent) zones of permafrost. Although permafrost is mostly absent beneath large lakes that don’t freeze solid, there are regions of the Arctic Ocean—with sea bottoms exposed in the Ice Age—that have permafrost, now known to be in active thaw as ocean temperatures warm.
Beringia is also referred to as the Bering Land Bridge. More than just a bridge, it stretched out as a 1,000-square-mile landmass that now underlies half of the Bering Sea. At the Glacial Maximum, the land called Beringia measured more than 600 miles from the Arctic Ocean south to the Aleutian Islands. It’s theorized that early hunters built villages on this ancient Atlantis, amid a high-plains grassland rife with animal life.
And I couldn’t get over the pressure of light against my face. I remember how I stared at it aglow on my hands. The evening light flowed like viscous liquid into the tent and set the sedges afire as if the wind carried a molten wave. It painted whitecaps on the lake, colored the snowbound peaks pink, and lit clouds into brigantines of fire.
As early as six thousand years ago—more than a millennia before the Egyptians began to build the pyramids—the ancients fished and hunted alongside the pure-blue, cloud-reflective waters of Lake Matcharak. Known to modern archaeologists as the Northern Archaic culture, followed by the Arctic Small Tool tradition (ASTt), named for the arrows and spearpoints minutely and carefully chipped from obsidian and chert, these hardy Iñupiat predecessors depended upon the caribou. The Canadian archaeologist Robert McGhee called them Palaeo-Eskimos, with no definitive link to the Inuit or Iñupiat (Eskimos) who succeeded them several thousand years later. Although their tools, hunt techniques, and houses mostly proved different from the more modern-day inhabitants of the Arctic, McGhee believed that they invented the igloo.
While this solo venture might have been one of the hardest things I had ever done, I also felt incredibly curious every time I turned a new corner of coast. I bowed to the sunsets. And I became attuned to the Arctic world around me in an instinctual way. How the sun’s rays swept in long horizontal arcs through the dawns. The distant hum that emanated from the sea on quiet days. And I looked forward to wildlife encounters or new horizons so eagerly that I all but leaped out of my sleeping bag each morning.
I am so thankful I learned that lesson (orientation to peace and beauty to my soul) aeons before my seventh decade, and I feel it on every inch of the planet, essentially, although there are truly ugly places on earth as well, that don’t convey peace as much as balance the peace with the knowledge it could all look like this, especially at the rate we are destroying the Earth. Books like these will be gargantuanly important then, when it is all gone, or only found in a few places on earth.
I am fascinated with a place that alternately resembles the lost world of the Pleistocene—gouged throughout by the ancient push of glaciers—then in the next moment is unexpectedly filled with weird spiders huddled on the side of their massive webs.
Kalulutok Creek would be called a river in most parts of the world. Here in Gates of the Arctic National Park and Preserve, amid the largest span of legislated wilderness in the United States, it’s just a creek compared to the massive Noatak River that we’re bound for. But in my mind—while we splash-walked packrafts and forded its depths at least thirty times yesterday—Kalulutok will always be an ice-cold, wild river. It drains the Endicott and Schwatka Mountains, which are filled with the most spectacular granite and limestone spires of the entire Brooks Range. One valley to the east of us is sky-lined with sharp, flinty peaks called the Arrigetch, or “fingers of the outstretched hand” in Iñupiaq.
The Arctic can be verdant in places and even look lush with ankle-high plants that flourish across summer-dampened permafrost. Yet the sparse annual precipitation makes many places arid. In the heart of the Brooks Range above 2,500 feet, Gates of the Arctic National Park and Preserve averages five to ten inches of precipitation a year, same as the Mojave Desert—with its sand dunes and sparse Joshua tree forests—in Southern California.
But amid the utter strangeness, the Arctic is scented with aged spices: the sweet turpentine of Labrador tea and the lilac perfume of the tiniest, most delicate pink twinflowers amid real bumblebees (not botflies) that gather pollen. The place is ribboned with rivers finned by peculiar and beautiful fish, playful ground squirrels chirp throughout, and the midnight sun burnishes the hillsides gold and makes the frequent rain showers glow like lemonade poured out of the sky. Beneath it all the active layer of permafrost tundra presents as a giant live body and holds forth an abundance of blueberries, bunchberries, crowberries, lingonberries, salmonberries, cranberries, and bearberries. So I have learned to swallow a bit of discomfort. To take deep breaths and let the landscape open my heart and fire my imagination like no place on Earth.
As the sun sinks below the horizon in August and night returns, in a curious continuity with the brilliant summer light show, solar winds blow particles into the upper atmosphere. This enlivens the night sky with colorful evanescence: gauzy saffron clouds and beams of viridescent and roseate flickers. The mysterious northern lights were named (by the astronomer Galileo four hundred years ago) after the Greek goddess Aurora, who flew through the sky to announce the dawn, and Borealis, the god of the north wind. Beneath the lights on a cold, still night in the wilderness even jaded skeptics can become Arctic Believers.
Although no creature moved within visible distance of the tent, the northern lights blazed above me in a brilliant green shimmery set of curtains that crinkled open and shut as if a bear panted and swished and pushed through the knee-high dwarf birch and sedges. No way could I go back to sleep. Scientists have recently proved that you can hear the lights. They’ve been described as two pieces of silk that are rubbed together. Or, as some people (me, for instance) claim, like an animal that stalks you through the brush.
You can imagine most-ancient Alaska when you slog past a dark boulder embossed with whitened squiggly patterns of shells and dendritic arms that show how the region once lay under a shallow sea, broken by low rounded mountains. Back then, three hundred to four hundred million years ago, before the seven continents existed, life consisted of spineless invertebrates: coral, tiny-tentacled and shelled brachiopods, and the now-extinct, three-lobed trilobites. In a museum with the boulder as a canvas, the fossils could be perceived as minute art forms of remarkable symmetry, but on foot in the vastness of the far-flung Brooks Range you want to feel the sense of purpose in it all and understand eons of change. The fossils represent some of the earliest life on Earth, a glimmer of a miraculous evolution of single-celled organisms that fused into many-celled primitive animals as their body plans diversified and radiated. Eventually they exploded into an array of invertebrates that would someday mutate into larger creatures—millions of caribou, for example—constructed with spider-webbed catchments of neurons wired to lobed brains that would transform them into sentient souls. Or so you can imagine.
Glaciers in the Brooks Range dammed the principal Noatak River drainage. The glaciers held back a series of lakes, collectively called Noatak Lake by geologists. It stretched 1,700 square miles. The sheer weight of the glaciers physically depressed the land and lowered Howard Pass (now 2,200 feet above sea level) a thousand feet. For several millennia, the westward flow of the Noatak River shifted north out of Noatak Lake and over the Brooks Range through Howard Pass.
Iñupiat call the ground nuna; when the upper, active layer of ground refroze every fall, they would say, “Nuna qiqitkaa.” To refrigerate their meat, they simply dug deep into the nuna to build an ice cellar (siġluaq). Since the ground was always frozen several feet down below the active layer, to name their cold storage otherwise would have been a fool’s repetition. They wouldn’t call ice “cold.” But in recent years villagers can’t rely on siġluaqs because the permafrost thaw floods the cellars.
Back then, it all happened. So. Slowly. Until humans began to arrive in places like Alaska. And soon enough, our species quickly jumpstarted a new period of extinction. Since 1500, 881 animal species have gone extinct (due to pollution, development, and climate change—according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature). This explains why the Iñupiat say that "the Earth is moving much faster now." Compared to repeated prehistoric climate change (except for the meteorite that hit sixty-six million years ago), the pace of climate change since humans began to migrate across continents—mostly after the recent Industrial Revolution—has already begun with ominous meteoric speed.
Before human-caused climate change, one can best picture the ancient Arctic migrations from the Iñupiat village of Alaska’s Little Diomede Island (population 100). From there, it’s a little over two miles west over the wind-frothed, icy waters of the Bering Strait to Russia’s hilly Diomede Island (which fast-forwards the clock twenty hours across the International Date Line). And one of the best ways to understand the immensity of ancient Brooks Range glaciation is to float the Noatak River. Past its permafrost-exposed banks, you can try to gauge the distance across the glacier-plucked valley. Once afloat, amid the thaw and extinctions of the past, it’s not hard to imagine your kayak as a time machine. My journey into Arctic wonder began there thirty-nine years ago.
What we’ve learned since then, with knowledge from the Russians, is that permafrost underlies 15 percent of the ice or glacial-free zones of the Northern Hemisphere (or 11 percent of the globe’s surface, which includes Antarctic lands and high alpine mountains outside the Arctic). Eighty percent of Alaska is underlain by permafrost. This includes the most northerly continuous zone (29 percent of the state—essentially above the Arctic Circle), the discontinuous (35 percent), and sporadic or isolated (16 percent) zones of permafrost. Although permafrost is mostly absent beneath large lakes that don’t freeze solid, there are regions of the Arctic Ocean—with sea bottoms exposed in the Ice Age—that have permafrost, now known to be in active thaw as ocean temperatures warm.
Beringia is also referred to as the Bering Land Bridge. More than just a bridge, it stretched out as a 1,000-square-mile landmass that now underlies half of the Bering Sea. At the Glacial Maximum, the land called Beringia measured more than 600 miles from the Arctic Ocean south to the Aleutian Islands. It’s theorized that early hunters built villages on this ancient Atlantis, amid a high-plains grassland rife with animal life.
And I couldn’t get over the pressure of light against my face. I remember how I stared at it aglow on my hands. The evening light flowed like viscous liquid into the tent and set the sedges afire as if the wind carried a molten wave. It painted whitecaps on the lake, colored the snowbound peaks pink, and lit clouds into brigantines of fire.
As early as six thousand years ago—more than a millennia before the Egyptians began to build the pyramids—the ancients fished and hunted alongside the pure-blue, cloud-reflective waters of Lake Matcharak. Known to modern archaeologists as the Northern Archaic culture, followed by the Arctic Small Tool tradition (ASTt), named for the arrows and spearpoints minutely and carefully chipped from obsidian and chert, these hardy Iñupiat predecessors depended upon the caribou. The Canadian archaeologist Robert McGhee called them Palaeo-Eskimos, with no definitive link to the Inuit or Iñupiat (Eskimos) who succeeded them several thousand years later. Although their tools, hunt techniques, and houses mostly proved different from the more modern-day inhabitants of the Arctic, McGhee believed that they invented the igloo.
While this solo venture might have been one of the hardest things I had ever done, I also felt incredibly curious every time I turned a new corner of coast. I bowed to the sunsets. And I became attuned to the Arctic world around me in an instinctual way. How the sun’s rays swept in long horizontal arcs through the dawns. The distant hum that emanated from the sea on quiet days. And I looked forward to wildlife encounters or new horizons so eagerly that I all but leaped out of my sleeping bag each morning.
December 19, 2024
An interesting memoir and really put's across the need for climate action.
Earlier Chapters were more interesting than the ending ones.
Earlier Chapters were more interesting than the ending ones.
January 11, 2025
A remarkable book, combining beautifully written descriptive prose, gorgeous photography, diligently footnoted research, humility and humor.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews