Breaking the Ice

Few people appreciate the challenge of freezing spray more than the fishermen of the Bering Sea. As the name suggests, freezing spray occurs when strong ocean winds whip near-freezing water onto already frozen surfaces, producing instantaneous ice accumulation. When you're an isolated community living on a tiny island in the middle of the Bering Sea, 200 miles from the Alaskan mainland, the conditions for freezing spray arise frequently, and the results can be catastrophic. Fishing crews must bash the ice off decks with sledgehammers before the accumulating weight capsizes the vessel, which can happen in minutes. With the advent of climate change, trying to forecast this deadly phenomenon is more challenging than ever, and, recently, the National Weather Service (NWS) has been both overpredicting and underpredicting freezing spray. The NWS uses all manner of advanced technology to make forecasts, but one source of information it doesn’t consider might well be the most important—the knowledge of people who have been dealing with freezing spray firsthand.

“Indigenous communities and local coastal communities have valid observations,” says Hannah-Marie Garcia, C’19, director of the Indigenous Sentinels Network for St. Paul Island. “We’re not tapping our most knowledgeable people. We’re missing so much data if we don’t tap our local fishing fleets.” Garcia’s mission, and that of ISN, is to support the collection of traditional ecological knowledge in remote native communities and to communicate that knowledge to scientists, resource managers, and policymakers. With Alaska experiencing the effects of climate change faster than any other place in the country, Garcia insists that Western science can no longer ignore Indigenous and traditional knowledge, not if humanity wants to be fully prepared to tackle and adapt to climate impacts holistically.

This year, as part of a pilot project, Garcia began working with fishermen in the Bering Sea to develop a process to record granular data on freezing spray. Using the ISN Skipper Science app, crews can now document wind speed and direction, air and water temperatures, weather conditions, and the accumulation of ice—or lack thereof—among other data points. They can augment this information with photographs and audio information. The data is being sent to the National Weather Service, and Garcia is confident it will soon be considered in the agency’s forecasts and will help improve weather forecast models.

The Skipper Science app is just one of many the ISN has developed with the tribes and communities across Alaska to monitor their changing ecological surroundings, everything from fisheries to coastal erosion to the health of marine mammals, including northern fur seal populations. Now, the organization, which is part of the island’s tribal government, is reaching out to other native communities across Alaska in hopes of expanding its network. This month Garcia will be visiting mainland communities up and down the Bering Sea coast, listening to residents discuss their changing landscapes and encouraging them to make their voices part of the climate solution.

As a coastal scientist, a policy expert, and a partially Indigenous person herself, Garcia can’t imagine anyone more perfectly suited for this role. “We need to recognize how to use both kinds of information, Western science and traditional knowledge,” she says. “I see myself and the ISN program as a bridge connecting Indigenous communities, scientists, and policymakers in order to weave together various efforts to support more informed and adaptive resource management.”

Garcia was born in Colorado but moved to Charleston, South Carolina, when she was four years old. Her father has both Sioux and Hispanic heritage and her mother is of European descent, but these elements did not feature prominently during Garcia’s childhood because most of their family lived out West, in Wyoming and Colorado. Only later in life would Garcia come to appreciate these vitally important aspects of her identity.

One aspect of her identity that did flourish in Charleston was her love of the coast. She spent much of her time at the beach. Growing up in a city that flooded regularly, she also became aware of climate change at an early age. “I was supposed to get my first car when I was 16, a Saab, but my brother parked it on the wrong side of the street,” she says. “It flooded.”

For her last two years of high school, Garcia attended the prestigious Lawrenceville School in New Jersey, and a highlight of her time there was traveling to the Peruvian rainforest for an environmental studies class. She helped her teacher, a bat expert, capture fruit bats at night with fly nets. She got bit twice while drawing blood and measuring wing spans, but it was all part of the experience of field ecology studies. The trip, along with one particular class lesson on human population growth and the carrying capacity of the environment, was a revelation for her. “It made me want to study not just the environment,” she says, “but how humans figure into the environment and how they impact it. We are, after all, a part of the environment—our actions impact every aspect, and we have a responsibility to be stewards of our community and surroundings.”

Garcia applied to 37—count ’em, 37—colleges. “I just couldn’t decide!” she says. She ultimately chose Sewanee for its intimacy, its natural beauty, and its generous financial aid. She majored in environmental studies and sustainability and minored in anthropology. These two subject areas merged perfectly for her in the tiny Caribbean nation of St. Vincent and the Grenadines, where she spent two summers of her college career assisting then-environmental studies professor Russell Fielding with his research on pilot whales. (Fielding now teaches at Coastal Carolina University). The whales are an important food source for the people of St. Vincent, although increasingly scientists are worried about mercury contamination. For her senior capstone project, Garcia and a team of eight other students conducted 980 interviews with island residents, asking questions like “How often do you eat whale?” and “Do you use the oil for medicinal purposes?” She had meetings with the country’s department of fisheries. “I was able to explore science communication through this project,” she says. “How do you communicate the results of your findings to policymakers? I wanted to know that.”

Another clarifying moment for Garcia during her time at Sewanee was a policy class she took with Fielding. “I realized, ‘This is how it all works!’” she says. “This is how we spread extractive systems, and this is how we fight extractive systems. This is how we regulate and use or not use the land. This is how communities get impacted. This class was my aha moment about how science and policy interact and where the potential for failure in our management regulations and policies can occur.”

After graduating from Sewanee, Garcia earned a master’s degree in marine policy from the University of Delaware, where she focused on how Indigenous communities along the mid-Atlantic coast perceive offshore wind power. Next came a yearlong fellowship that seemed tailor-made for her: the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Sea Grant program in Alaska needed someone to develop strategies to raise Indigenous voices in conservation. “Looking back on it, of course I ended up in Alaska,” she says. “Alaska has the longest coastline in the country, it has the most tribes, and it’s the canary in the coal mine when it comes to climate change—ocean acidification, rapid warming, heat waves in the ocean, algal blooms. The list goes on and on. I told myself I wanted to be on the front lines of climate change, and I found our most pressing challenges here in Alaska.”

The other thing Garcia found in Alaska was a greater daily presence of Indigenous people and culture. Some 16% of Alaska’s population is Indigenous, a larger percentage than any other state in the country. This resonated with her. She started becoming more tapped into her own native heritage. “There are 228 recognized tribes in this state, with 180,000 members,” she says. “In Alaska, it’s just so present. It’s not like that in the Lower 48.” Around the same time she relocated to Alaska, Garcia says she also found more time to reconnect with family without the pressures of higher education and her grandmother began “sharing about her Sioux heritage, which is great. She gave me a book recently on all of our teachings.”

When Garcia’s Sea Grant fellowship concluded, the Tribal Government of St. Paul Island hired her to coordinate and direct the ISN program. She lives in the mainland town of Cordova, but she travels to the island three or four times a year, which is a logistical gauntlet. Four days a week there’s one flight a day to the island, and it's a four- to six-hour journey from Anchorage that requires a refueling stop in Cold Bay or Bethel because the plane is so small. “One time I flew three hours to Cold Bay, but then I had to turn around and go back to Anchorage because of the fog,” she says. Another time her return flight to the mainland was canceled four days in a row, forcing her to stay on the island five extra days.

It’s not a bad place to be stranded. The treeless island has cliffs and rolling hills blanketed in tundra, with seal rookeries on the beaches and orcas just offshore. It’s often windy. People travel the dirt roads on four-wheelers. “You have this feeling of being so far out there,” she says. “It’s very quiet and really breathtaking.” Garcia loves being with the people. She doesn’t view herself as a scientist teaching or training them. She views community members as scientists too and sees research as “kin-making.” “We understand that we are always learning from each other and from the lands and waters that surround us. We do this together, one day at a time. Every action for the benefit of future generations.”