Arctic Infrastructure Science Talks

Join us for a short series of online talks as we gear up for Arctic Science Summit Week 2025 and the ICARP IV Summit. Each talk will be followed by time for discussion that will focus on research priorities for the next 10 years.

2024-2025: December to February | Online

All talks are at 9:00a Alaska, 1:00p Eastern, 18:00 UTC, and 19:00 in Western/Central Europe. (Time Zone Converter) . The meeting link will be sent in advance to the RATIC email list. Use the contact form below to request being added the mailing list.

Upcoming Talks

Thurs, January 9: Anthropological Research on Arctic Infrastructure
Peter Schweitzer and Olga Povoroznyuk, University of Vienna
It has been only recently that the social sciences and humanities have engaged with infrastructure in earnest. Anthropology was a latecomer to infrastructure studies, but more recently there has been a veritable explosion of anthropological literature on the subject. A main thrust of anthropological research has been conducted to show how infrastructures become terrains for political engagement. Thus, social anthropology explores infrastructure as political and modernisation projects and social agents. It focuses on infrastructure imaginaries, promises and process of (mal)functioning, ruination, and reconstruction to investigate cultural dynamics and social conflicts and movements. Social scientists and anthropologists focusing on Arctic infrastructure have been studying entanglements between local and Indigenous communities and infrastructure in the contexts of rapid climate change, remoteness, and resource extaction. While there is a long history of social impact assessments of development projects, we argue that anthropologists, and other social scientists working in the Arctic, should focus more on social configurations of privileges and ineqalities resulting from the affordances and “fly-over” effects of infrastructure, as well as on different forms of knowledge produced by infrastructure. The main goal of our talk is to provide an overview of recent developments in anthropological research on infrastructure. During this talk we will keep a regional focus on the Arctic and provide empirical examples from our research projects.
Thurs, January 16: History of Arctic infrastructure development in Alaska and Russia
Phil Wight and Tyler Kirk, University of Alaska Fairbanks
By 1968, the Arctic was almost unrecognizable compared with the turn of the twentieth century. New airfields stood at the center of new military bases, new pipelines and roads connected urban areas with this militarized infrastructure, new cities in the Soviet Arctic emerged from Gulags, weather and radar stations lined Soviet and North American Arctic coasts, new harbor facilities opened the Northern Sea Route to regular use, and atomic weapons—including the largest nuclear bomb ever detonated—were regularly exploded in the Arctic. This spiderweb sprawl of infrastructure had profound social, political, economic, and environmental implications for local peoples and their larger nation states. This presentation details how the circumpolar North became central to global geopolitics and precipitated the unprecedented industrialization and militarization of the region between 1900 and 1968.
Thurs, February 6: Innovative permafrost monitoring and research directions for resilient Arctic civil infrastructure
Ming Xiao, Penn State University
Abstract pending

Past Talks

Thurs, December 5: Pan-Arctic assessment of coastal settlements and infrastructure vulnerable to coastal erosion, sea-level rise, and permafrost thaw
Rodrigue Tanguy, bGeos | Slides | Watch | Open Access paper
This study assesses the vulnerability of Arctic coastal settlements and infrastructure to coastal erosion, Sea-Level Rise (SLR) and permafrost warming. For the first time, we characterize coastline retreat consistently along permafrost coastal settlements at the regional scale for the Northern Hemisphere. We provide a new method to automatically derive long-term coastline change rates for permafrost coasts. In addition, we identify the total number of coastal settlements and associated infrastructure that could be threatened by marine and terrestrial changes using remote sensing techniques. We extended the Arctic Coastal Infrastructure dataset (SACHI) to include road types, airstrips, and artificial water reservoirs. The analysis of coastline position, Ground Temperature (GT) and Active Layer Thickness (ALT) changes from 2000-2020, in addition with SLR projection, allowed to identify settlements and infrastructure exposed to permafrost thaw for 2030, 2050, and 2100. We validated the SACHI-v2, GT and ALT datasets through comparisons with in-situ data. 60% of the detected infrastructure is built on low-lying coast (< 10 m a.s.l). The results show that in 2100, 45% of all coastal settlements will be affected by SLR and 21% to coastal erosion. On average, coastal permafrost GT is increasing by 0.8 °C per decade, and ALT is increasing by 6 cm per decade. In 2100, GT will become positive at 77% of the built infrastructure area. Our results highlight the circumpolar and international amplitude of the problem and emphasize the need for immediate adaptation measures to current and future environmental changes to counteract a deterioration of living conditions and ensure infrastructure sustainability.

Past Series: 2021-2022 series

Presentation slides are posted with the speaker's permission. Go to Workshops & Meetings for other past presentations and posters.

2022
THU 20 Jan 18:00 GMT Dmitrii Sergeev
Sergeev Institute of Environmental Geoscience RAS
Approaches to Improving the Geotechnical Monitoring of Highways in the Permafrost Regions of Russia (slides)
Donald A. (Skip) Walker
Alaska Geobotany Center, Institute of Arctic Biology, University of Alaska Fairbanks
Cumulative impacts of a gravel road and climate change in an ice-wedge polygon landscape, Prudhoe Bay, AK (slides)
THU 17 Feb 18:00 GMT Chandi Witharana
University of Connecticut

Transformation of Big Imagery into Arctic Science Ready Products

SAT 26 Mar 13:00-17:00 GMT RATIC/T-MOSAiC Community Meeting at Arctic Science Summit Week
Online / In-person, Tromsø, Norway
Agenda (PDF)
THU 21 Apr 17:00 GMT Vladislav Isaev
Geocryology Department, Moscow State University

Multi-Parameter Protocol for Geocryological Test Site: A Case Study Applied for the European North of Russia (slides)

THU 26 May 17:00 GMT Simon Zwieback
Geophysical Institute, University of Alaska Fairbanks

Remote sensing of landscape changes following the 2015 flooding of the Sagavanirktok River in Prudhoe Bay, Alaska

2021
THU 15 Apr 17:00 GMT Oleg Anisimov
Department of Climate Change, State Hydrological Institute in St. Petersburg, Russia
Monitoring oil spill in Norilsk, Russia using satellite data (Slides)
THU 20 May 17:00 GMT Moritz Langer
Alfred Wegener Institute, Potsdam, Germany

Annett Bartsch (5 min project intro)
b.geos & Austrian Polar Research Institute, Vienna, Austria

Thawing permafrost and the potential release of toxic industrial substances in the Arctic
THU 16 Sept 17:00 GMT Annett Bartsch
b.geos & Austrian Polar Research Institute, Vienna, Austria
Expanding infrastructure and growing anthropogenic impacts along Arctic coasts (open access paper)
THU 28 Oct 17:00 GMT Thomas Schneider von Deimling
Alfred Wegener Institute, Potsdam, Germany
Risks and consequences of permafrost degradation on infrastructure (slides)
THU 18 Nov 18:00 GMT Noor Johnson
University of Colorado Boulder, National Snow and Ice Data Center, Navigating the New Arctic Community Office (NNA-CO) Social Sciences Lead
Social and technical dimensions of community data management: An overview from the ELOKA program (slides)
Magnus De Witt
School of Science and Engineering, Reykjavik University, Iceland
Availability and Feasibility of Renewables in the Arctic (slides)
THU 16 Dec 18:00 GMT No Talk  
 

Get In Touch

  • Mailing Address

    Jana Peirce, Coordinator
    Alaska Geobotany Center
    Institute of Arctic Biology
    University of Alaska
    311 Irving
    P.O. Box 757000
    Fairbanks, Alaska
    99775 USA
  • Phone

    +1 907 474-2459