Simply shy of the Arctic Circle, the place Alaska’s Seward Peninsula stretches westward towards Russia, there’s a most inconceivable sliver of land. Level Spencer sits on the northern tip of a miles-long, slender spit of sand, gravel, and permafrost that’s lower than 100 toes large in locations. To the east is Port Clarence Bay, the place depths can exceed 40 toes—an anomaly amid the area’s shallow coastal waters. To the west is the wild and unforgiving Bering Sea, residence to winter storms that commonly churn out waves 45 toes or taller.

In between, the positioning that’s now Level Spencer has, at varied instances, been lots of of miles inland or utterly inundated by the ocean. It has witnessed waves of human dispersal over millennia, and served as each an intercontinental market and a Chilly Battle army outpost. Now, as one other chapter for Level Spencer begins, it may be seen in a stunning means: Magnified 10 instances, sand initially collected from one in every of its seashores seems as glittering, semiprecious stones.

The jewel-like particles signify a variety of minerals, together with moss-green olivine, blue-green glauconite, and iron-rich, orange-colored quartz. The variation speaks to how Level Spencer shaped—no less than, in its most up-to-date incarnation.

For millennia, the spot that’s now Level Spencer was greater than 500 miles inland, at roughly the middle of Beringia, a landmass that linked Asia and North America over the last Ice Age. The primary people arrived to the Americas by way of this hall, each on land and by following the coast. Because the local weather warmed, ice sheets melted and rising seawater inundated Beringia. The realm round Level Spencer was one of many final spots left excessive and dry, and solely sank beneath the waves about 6,000 years in the past.

As the fashionable shoreline took form, glacial meltwater flowed into the ocean by way of Imuruk Basin and an estuary to the east. Like most of Alaska, the Seward Peninsula is geologically complicated, and the water accumulating within the basin carried a wide range of materials, every with its personal mineral composition: volcanic rock from an historic lava area to the north, silty sediment washed in from the tundra, and even specks of gold from the Kigluaik Mountains to the south. Currents, whipping in a hook-like form past the estuary, deposited the disparate bits of rock, sand, and natural matter alongside a curve between the Seward Peninsula and open sea, creating the spit over time, and protecting Port Clarence Bay freed from silt and different sediment.

The Iñupiat folks used the Level Spencer space for hundreds of years as a gathering place for commerce between teams on either side of the Bering Strait, and as a staging space for searching seals and whales. Human stays discovered on the spit by archaeologists a decade in the past, and repatriated in 2021, could also be 300 to 600 years outdated. The spit was not a straightforward place to dwell: On no less than one event, in 1912, as skies blackened with ash from the highly effective Novarupta eruption about 600 miles away on the Alaska Peninsula, a storm surge submerged your entire spit.

Within the mid-Twentieth century, the strategic mixture of proximity to the Bering Strait and presence of a deepwater bay attracted the U.S. army. The Coast Guard established a long-range radio navigation station on the northern finish of the spit for half a century. Its 1,350-foot radio tower was, for many years, the tallest construction in Alaska.

The tower was dismantled when the Port Clarence station closed in 2010. In 2020, possession of the two,000-plus acres was transferred to the Iñupiat-administered Bering Straits Native Company. Now, as dwindling sea ice opens new ship routes and international locations clamor for affect in a warming Arctic, Level Spencer is poised for a brand new chapter. Potential plans for future growth embrace a scientific analysis station and a brand new port. No matter form the spit’s future takes, the waves lapping its seashores will proceed to depart behind an array of tiny jewels.

Alaskan Sand, taken by Xinpei Zhang, was lately named as an Picture of Distinction within the Nikon Small World Photomicrography Competitors.