Radars Taken Out by Arctic Warming

By Andrew C. Revkin

The Point Lonely early-warning radar installation in Alaska is being shut down.

The continuing warming and summertime retreats of sea ice around the North Pole are making life difficult for seal-hunting polar bears, eroding Inuit coastal villages and now, evidently, eroding Arctic defenses (although not weakening them, the Pentagon insists).

This just in from Eric Schmitt, a defense reporter for The Times:

In another weird sign of global warming…

The Pentagon is closing down three of the 20 NORAD (North American Aerospace Defense Command) early-warning radar sites in northern Alaska because the ground they’re built on in some cases is literally crumbling into the Arctic Ocean as a result of erosion caused by waves on ice-free waters, military officials at the U.S. Northern Command tell me. One site, Point Lonely, a short-range radar on Alaska’s North Slope, was closed specifically because of soil erosion. In two other cases, short-range radars in Bullen Point and Wainwright, are being shuttered for both erosion and budget reasons.

The 47 NORAD sites in Canada are not affected, a Canadian military spokesman said. The Northern Command assures me that shuttering the three sites will leave no gap in U.S. defenses because of overlapping coverage from other radars.