Community Ice Cellars In Eastern Chukotka: Climatic And Anthropogenic Influences On Structural Stability

• Published in: GEOGRAPHY, ENVIRONMENT, SUSTAINABILITY
• Main Authors: Alexey Maslakov A., Kelsey Nyland E., Nina Komova N., Fedor Yurov D., Kenji Yoshikawa, Gleb Kraev N.
• Other Authors: This study was supported by the Russian Foundation for Basic Research, award 18-05-60080 (data analysis), Russian Science Foundation award 19-77-00045 (field work in 2019 and weather data retrieval), US National Science Foundation awards OPP-130455 and OPP-1836377/1836381, Russian Academy of Sciences state assignment 0191-2019- 0044, and the U.S. Department of State Fulbright Scholar Program. Any opinions, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this study are those of the authors, and do not necessarily reflect the views of any of the funding agencies. Mention of specific product names does not constitute endorsement by any of the funding agencies. The authors thank Mikhael Zelensky and Evgenii Sivsiv for their participation in interviews. We also thank Gennady Zelensky, Igor Khuramshin, and Alexey Ottoy for organizing logistics, performing maintenance on data loggers, and for providing access to the ice cellars in Lorino and Inchoun. Lastly, we thank anonymous reviewers whose comments improved this paper
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: Russian Geographical Society 2020
• Subjects: ice cellars; permafrost; indigenous communities; climate change; food security; Chukotka; Russia; Arctic; Lorino; Arctic Fox; Chukchi; Circumpolar Health; Climate change; Ice; International Journal of Circumpolar Health; Permafrost and Periglacial Processes
• Online Access: https://ges.rgo.ru/jour/article/view/1192; https://doi.org/10.24057/2071-9388-2020-71

The large community ice cellar designs in eastern Chukotka are unique within the Arctic due to the mixed influences from the indigenous Chukchi people and western industry. Community ice cellars here were designed and constructed in the 1950s-60s to accommodate both food stores for local indigenous residents and feed stores for Arctic fox fur farms. Like much of the Arctic, this region is undergoing unprecedented climate change. Air temperatures within the study area have been increasing at an average rate of 0.7°C per decade since the 1950s. Exacerbating the adverse effects of the warming climate is the lack of ice cellar maintenance in communities where the fur industry did not survive the transition to a market economy. Today, all but two community ice cellars in eastern Chukotka have flooded or collapsed. Presented in this work are thermal records from two cellars in the region that allow for both climatic and anthropogenic influences on the cellars’ structural integrity to be evaluated. Particularly effective ice cellar maintenance practices utilized in the community of Lorino were 1) wintertime ventilation, and 2) placing large blocks of river ice in the cellar in spring to mitigate spring and summer warming.