In Alaska, there lay a small village by the name of Shishmaref. This little village is located just a little ways from the Arctic Circle, 100 miles from Russia and a couple hundred miles away from Anchorage, the biggest city in Alaska.

The village is located on a barrier island, and faces grave danger in completely being taken out to sea.  This island’s coast is protected by the ice that surrounds it, but as the ice is disappearing, the island is eroding away, with big storms taking chunks of land out to sea.

Many people in the this village have had houses on the receding coastline, leaving their house falling to the sea. Although there are only about 560 people living in this small Inupiat village, they are worried that soon they will be in danger, for by 2053, a good fourth of their village will no longer be around.

All of these changes come due to the warming of the earth, mainly coming from the 1200 metric tons of carbon dioxide that humans put into the atmosphere each second. Not only is the ice disappearing, but the ice still left is forming later and thawing earlier, hurting everything that uses the ice like polar bears, and the people in this village. These villagers are even missing the cold weather, with the weather in the -30 to -40 Fahrenheit, while now it is only 20 degrees above Fahrenheit.

The warming of the earth is a tragedy of itself, but also for many others. Some in this village have even fallen through the ice and died, but it will become even more of a tragedy if we do nothing to stop it.