Decades After Project Chariot, Researchers Revisit Cape Thompson’s Lagoons

A failed megaproject along the Chukchi Sea triggered environmental studies of northwest Alaska wetlands more than 50 years ago. How have these ecosystems changed since then?

2018: Cool, salty gales sweep the surface of the Chukchi Sea, stinging the faces of three Wildlife Conservation Society scientists as they depart the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Research Vessel Tiĝlax̂ and skiff to the shores of Cape Thompson in Alaska’s North Slope Borough.  

More than 100 miles north of the Arctic Circle, life thrives in this coastal mosaic of emerald and azure. Lagoons dominate, their waters and vegetation a haven for shorebirds, waterfowl, caribou, and migratory fish, including Pacific salmon and herring. The subsistence harvest along and off these shores – just 30 miles south of the Iñupiat village Tikiġaq (Point Hope) – is bountiful, having supported Indigenous lifeways since time immemorial. 

And yet, if not for these local communities and their voices, this land may have been lost completely, some 70 years ago, to the Atomic Era and industrial ambition. 

In the 1950s and ‘60s, as the United States experimented with “peaceful” uses for nuclear weapons, the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission proposed the detonation of five hydrogen bombs in the Ogotoruk Creek Valley, just south of Cape Thompson. The effort, named Project Chariot, sought to clear land for the construction of a shipping harbor and storm shelter. 

Iñupiat residents successfully urged the commission to reconsider. They expressed the land’s cultural and ecological significance, communicating the permanent destruction such blasts would wreak on its ecosystems and subsistence users.  

Chariot’s leaders acknowledged these concerns, though only to an extent – while no bombs were detonated, extensive drilling and nuclear testing continued. Extreme soil contamination contributed to the region’s elevated cancer rate, which remains today one of the highest in the country.

Project Chariot also commissioned environmental studies. For several years in the late 1950s and early 1960s, dozens of researchers populated a tent city at Ogotoruk Creek. Their focus areas included caribou, plants, geology, marine and freshwater fish, and lagoon ecosystems. Though millennia’s worth of Indigenous Knowledge of the region already existed, it was the first time that government-directed environmental studies were conducted. At last, in 1962, to the relief of Indigenous communities, Chariot altogether was shelved.  

More than a half-century later, as the destructive legacy of Chariot persists, these initial environmental impact studies are nonetheless a valuable baseline for climate change researchers: offering valuable data, especially given the current Arctic amplification of climate change effects and increasing interest in development in and around Cape Thompson. 

Original source can be found here