ST. PAUL ISLAND, Alaska — This tiny island in the middle of the Bering Sea had recently completed its longest winter stretch in recorded history with above-freezing temperatures — 343 consecutive hours, or 14 days — when Aaron Lestenkof drove out to look at Sea Lion Neck.
It was another warm February day. He saw no sea ice; scant snow on the ground.
Lestenkof is one of the sentinels on the island, a small team with the Aleut tribe who monitors changes to the environment across these 43 square miles of windswept hills and tundra. He is also one of 338 residents who still manage to live on St. Paul, something that has become significantly more complicated as the Bering Sea warms around them.
Over the past decade, steadily warming waters have thrown the North Pacific into turmoil, wiping out populations of fish, birds and crabs, and exposing coastlines to ever more battering from winter storms. The upheaval in the waters has brought so much change to this remote island, where residents still fill their freezers with reindeer and seals, that it has forced many to consider how long they can last.
The warm waters killed off about 4 million common murres — the largest die-off of any bird species ever recorded in the modern era — including almost 80 percent of those that nested on St. Paul. They wiped out about 10 billion snow crabs; caused the collapse of the main Alaskan fishery that relied on them; and prompted the closing, three years ago, of St. Paul’s largest source of tax revenue, a Trident Seafoods crab processing plant.
City funds fell by 60 percent. The number of city employees dropped from 43 to 18. The police force disbanded. People moved away.
The Bering Sea’s record-breaking heat wave started in 2018. Erin Fedewa, a fisheries biologist, saw firsthand the carnage wrought by this explosion during NOAA’s annual survey of crab and fish populations as the waters warmed. In 2021, she spent two months on a bottom trawl boat. Three years earlier, her nets teemed with young snow crab. Now they were coming up empty.
The subsequent research by Fedewa and others on the disappearance of more than 90 percent of the population found that warmer water sped up the crabs’ metabolism and led to a mass starvation event.
The past few years have seen cooler waters in the Bering Sea. Snow crab started to recover and the Bering Sea fishery reopened last year with a small quota, although St. Paul’s processing plant stayed closed. Federal disaster funds and a share of tax revenue from crab delivered to other ports have helped stabilize city finances.
This winter, however, ice in the Bering Sea has again been disappointing, part of a record low across the Arctic. And for the past three months, a warm trend has reemerged.
The decline of the fur seals that once attracted fortune-hunters to this island from around the world remains a mystery.
Rodney Towell, a NOAA statistician, has been visiting St. Paul to count those seals for the past 37 years. There were about 182,000 fur seals born his first year and 67,000 in his most recent estimate. Whether the driving force is an inability to find food, disease, overfishing, warming waters or some combination of other factors is still largely unknown, he said.
Paul Melovidov, 64, who leads the indigenous sentinel program with the tribe’s ecosystem office, described the same experience watching seabirds thin out. The magnificent, uncountable flocks that would descend each spring is something his younger colleagues will not get to see.