Rapid Arctic Transitions due to Infrastructure and Climate (RATIC). An initiative of the of the International Arctic Science Committee (IASC).

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.

Upcoming: RATIC Workshop at Arctic Science Summit Week

Mon, March 24 (Hybrid) Planning for the next decade in Arctic infrastructure research: a contribution to ICARP IV

Co-chairs: Olga Povoroznyuk, Howard Epstein, Vera Kuklina

University of Colorado Boulder, Glen Miller Ballroom (Rm 212), University Memorial Center, and online
8:30-12:00 US Mountain Time (UTC -7)

Through a series of short presentations followed by muldtidisciplinary discussions, the RATIC Workshop seeks to summarize progress from the past decade and identify research priorities and directions for the next 10 years related to Arctic infrastructure and the natural and social systems that impact it and are impacted by it. We will bring what we learn to the ICARP IV Summit on March 25-28 in Boulder and in a collaborative journal article to follow.

ASSW Registration is required. To attend the RATIC Workshop, please select either Full ASSW 2025 registration, Community and Business Meeting Days Only, or a Day Ticket for Monday, March 24. (Information on how to join remotely will be provided to registered participants by ASSW prior to the conference.)

RATIC Online Series: 2024-2025

Thu, 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 | AI Summary | 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.

Thu, January 9: Anthropological Research on Arctic Infrastructure

Peter Schweitzer and Olga Povoroznyuk, University of Vienna | Watch | AI Summary

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.

Thu, January 16 (Online): History of Arctic infrastructure development in Alaska and Russia

Phil Wight and Tyler Kirk, University of Alaska Fairbanks | Watch | AI Summary

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.

Thu, February 6 (Online): Innovative permafrost monitoring and research directions for resilient Arctic civil infrastructure

Ming Xiao, Penn State University | Watch | AI Summary

To build resilient civil infrastructure in the changing and extreme environments in the Arctic, accurate knowledge of permafrost with fine spatial resolution over extended area and period is needed. This entails innovative permafrost monitoring approaches. This presentation describes several such methods, including distributed acoustic and temperature sending, drone-based geophysical survey, with ground-truth validation using traditional borehole and geophysical testing. This presentation also points out that digital representation of the interdependent civil infrastructure and permafrost systems as a new research direction. This includes developing a digital twin of the civil infrastructure and permafrost systems to inform infrastructure maintenance and development; a concept of such approach is introduced.

Past Series: 2021-2022 series

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

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