Crossing the Bering Land Bridge

NPR reports on the discovery of a 11,500 year old house in Alaska that probably belonged to some of the first people to migrate to the Americas over the Bearing Land Bridge during the last Ice Age. Just 500 years later the Land Bridge was submerged by rising sea levels.

It’s a good article to go to for our discussion of human migration patterns. It also has the added poignancy of the fact that, at the end, the home was turned into a burial crypt for a young member of the family.

Global Warming Refugees

NPR’s Brian Reed has an excellent two-part series on the small island nation of Kiribati‘s preparations to adapt to global warming.

Kiribati. (Map from the U.S. Congress via Wikimedia Commons).

Small island nations are the most sensitive to the effects of global warming. Rising sea levels will substantially affect places where the land is just a few meters above sea level. But small islands also have limited capacity to adapt to significant changes.

These articles tie in to our questions of modern migration, which we discussed last cycle (C3) and environmental change.

[googleMap name=”Tarawa Island, Kiribati” description=”Tarawa is the capital of the Kiribati Islands” width=”480″ height=”480″ mapzoom=”10″ mousewheel=”false” directions_to=”false”]Tarawa Island, Kiribati[/googleMap]