Tuesday, September 24, 2024 
Tuesday, September 24, 2024
July 30, 2019
As blogged on CBC News, Margaret and Edward Kelly’s home is coming apart at the seams.
The joints holding their walls, floors and ceilings together expand and contract as the ground underneath moves, a few centimetres at a time.
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They built their family home in Fort Good Hope, on the banks of the Mackenzie River in the Northwest Territories, 30 years ago. Over the past decade, they’ve fought to keep the house together.
But every time they make a repair, another gap appears between the walls, or a section of the floor sinks.
“It’s dangerous to live here,” Margaret Kelly, 77, said. “The plywood underneath the floor moves. You can feel the house moving. It’s unstable.”
The Kellys are one of at least a dozen families in Fort Good Hope who feel threatened as the ground literally shifts beneath their feet. They blame the thawing permafrost, which is shifting the land and the houses that sit on top of it.
“In the winter, you can feel the draft from the wind coming from under the doors,” Kelly said, noting there are gaps “an inch wide” between the door and the floor. “By springtime, you can feel that the house has shifted again.”
About 500 people live in Fort Good Hope, which is just 100 kilometres south of the Arctic Circle. It sits high on ridges lining the Mackenzie River, which meanders past this community on its 1,700-kilometre route from Great Slave Lake to the Arctic Ocean.
The permafrost has strengthened the land underneath the community for centuries. But as climate change warms the permafrost, it leaves the land vulnerable to heavy rain and landslides that carve away huge chunks of earth.
The risks posed by degrading permafrost are well known in the North, but there’s relatively little hard data showing exactly what’s happening and where.
But now, researchers with the territorial government are working on creating an N.W.T-wide permafrost map that may help people living in remote communities adapt to their changing climate.
