In Shishmaref, Alaska, no one’s asking if climate change is real. What they want to know is how bad it has to get before the world decides to act.

When a major storm hit Shishmaref, Alaska in 2005, the town became a poster child for climate change in the Arctic. Dramatic pictures of houses falling into the sea showed up in news outlets around the world. But the story here starts way before that storm.

All across the Arctic, frozen soil is thawing out. A lot of stuff is buried there – plants and animals that lived more than 10,000 years ago. What happens when a Paleolithic bison bone starts to decompose for the first time? And what does that have to do with climate change?

An eight-ton concrete ball and a 32,000-year-old needle collection. What's all this got to do with the climate change in Arctic? Find out on this episode of Threshold.

Take a trip through the Norwegian archipelago, meet workers in Norway’s tourism industry, and get a glimpse of some of the Arctic’s charismatic megafauna.

After thousands of years of tradition, a shifting climate is forcing changes in the way Sámi families herd reindeer. But some climate solutions are also threatening their way of life. This is the story of the Aleksandersens, a Sámi reindeer herding family in northern Norway.

If there's one thing everybody's heard about the Arctic, it's that sea ice is melting, and that's bad news. But what's less well-known is that some people see opportunity in sea ice loss. This time, take a seat in the captain's chair of a Finnish icebreaker, sing along with a very musical Alaskan mayor, and find out what it means when the world gets a whole new ocean.

What happens when the thing you can’t live without in the short term is the same thing that threatens your very existence in the long term? That’s our question for this episode, viewed through the eyes of two whalers from Utqiagvik, Alaska.

Russia has more land in the Arctic than any other nation. It's also a regime that does not tolerate dissent. What does this mean for residents of Murmansk, the Arctic's largest city?

Half of the Arctic is in Russia, and half of Russia is in the Arctic. Oil, minerals, pollution — it's a web of complicated environmental stories that need to be told. But in Russia, investigative journalists have become an endangered species. Spend some time around a nickel smelter and meet a veteran journalist fighting to do his job.

All across the Arctic, indigenous languages are on the decline. But in many communities, people are finding new ways to reclaim both language and culture. Join some Inuit rockers in northern Canada in the recording studio, singing in their own language and making their first new studio album in more than 30 years. 

The Greenland ice sheet is basically a giant ice cube the size of Alaska. What happens when it melts? We spent five days camping out on the ice with a team of scientists who are trying to find out.

Eighteen months of reporting. All eight Arctic countries. So many fascinating people. On the final episode of season two of Threshold, we pull back a little and try to see the big picture. Join us as we bust some myths, travel back in time in a Swedish forest, and search for road maps into the future.

We're following up on the story of a Sámi reindeer herding family in northern Norway – Risten and Reiulf Aleksandersen and their kids. As we learned in episode six, climate change is disrupting this family’s herding traditions. But over the last year, they’ve also been heavily impacted by a new wind farm that's going in on grazing grounds.

What do "Ice Ice Baby" by Vanilla Ice and "What Have You Done for Me Lately" by Janet Jackson have to do with the Arctic and climate change?

Find out in this season two special, which will take you on a journey into a permafrost tunnel near Fairbanks, Alaska. This tunnel is sort of a Paleo-museum, a network of human-made caves full of mammoth tusks, bison horns, and clumps of 20,000-year-old grass. All of which is frozen—for now.

To get us through this trying time, we’re inviting you around a virtual bonfire to share an Arctic story from our vault. 

In the 1920s, Ada Blackjack, an Iñupiaq woman from Nome, Alaska, was recruited to tag along on an expedition to a remote chunk of land north of Siberia called Wrangel Island. Along with four men, seven sled dogs, and a cat, she set off in September of 1921. The trip was anticipated to last a year. But just about nothing on that trip went according to plan. 

In this Threshold extra, we follow Ada’s journey, a tale that could have lots to teach us about our own time of isolation.

The Greenland ice sheet is the second largest body of frozen water in the world, with the potential to raise sea levels by 23 feet if it melts. 

In this Threshold extra, we’re talking with leading climate scientists and glaciologists about the cryosphere—all the things that are frozen in the Earth’s system: permafrost, sea ice, land ice, and snow. We take a close look at how two of its key elements have fared in 2020: the Greenland ice sheet and Arctic sea ice. Each of these components of the cryosphere has large and immediate impacts on our climate. And their fate will affect everything from health care to migration, national security, and what life might look like in a rapidly changing world.