Evacuation Of Shishmaref, AK, Now Underway

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CBS 5) Evacuations have begun in Western Alaska, where rising sea levels will soon wipe out an Eskimo village. House by house, the Alaskan Eskimo village of Shishmaref is falling into the ocean. Shishmaref sits on an island a quarter of a mile across and two and a half miles long. Its 600 people are moving. They call themselves the first refugees of global warming.

"It's like an ice cube with a bunch of houses on it, sitting on the beach. If it stays really cold, these houses can sit there forever, but if it warms just a little bit, the ice cube starts to melt, and the houses start to shift," said Chris Field of the Carnegie Institution's Department of Global Ecology.

National Geographic reports global temperatures could rise as much as 10 degrees by the end of the century. The 1990s were the warmest decade since record keeping began in the 1800s.

In just the past 50 years, temperatures in parts of Russia, Canada and Alaska have increased as much as 7 degrees. The hard sea ice that once protected Shishmaref has begun to melt, making the village more vulnerable to giant storms and waves, Field said.

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