Permafrost: A Dormant Danger?
By Colin A. Warren
On August 8, Guido Grosse, a former professor at UAF and the current head of the Permafrost Research Section at the Alfred Wegener Institute in Potsdam, Germany, joined Strait Science via Zoom to discuss his work.
Northwest Campus and Alaska Sea Grant present the Strait Science Series lectures to promote understanding between citizens of the Bering Strait region and the researchers who frequent the Seward Peninsula. Besides Grosse, they have recently hosted a Lt. Commander of the U.S. Coast Guard to discuss search and rescue operations and a group of NOAA scientists in the area doing tests for harmful algal blooms.
Grosse and his colleagues have been using remote sensing with satellite data to document landscape changes and thaw processes on the Seward and Baldwin peninsulas of Western Alaska for years.
He explained that his background was in geology before moving to Fairbanks and spending seven years there conducting research and completing his PhD. Then he moved back to Germany to work but has maintained connections to Alaska, visiting often.
Grosse said that permafrost is unique from other parts of the cryosphere in that it is only defined by temperature and that it is defined by any ground that remains below freezing for at least two years in a row.
Gay Sheffield, the host of Strait Science, mentioned that the building she was operating in was tilting due to thawing permafrost, a common issue in the sub-Arctic.
But slanted foundations are hardly the only concern deriving from melting permafrost, Grosse explained. The specter of drastically accelerated climate change lives dormant in permafrost.
“The amount of carbon stored in permafrost is almost twice as much as we have in the atmosphere currently and way more than we have in current living vegetation,” he said. “If we have warming and harmful thawing, some of this carbon might be mobilized and be turned into greenhouse gasses that go into the atmosphere and contribute to further warming.”
He continued explaining his research, saying that by 2050, permafrost will start disappearing from the Seward Peninsula. By the end of the century, large areas will likely be entirely permafrost-free.
To elucidate how this will damage infrastructures and buildings, he told the audience that when the ground is formed by permafrost, it is usually about 80% ice. That means that most of the solid ground will dissipate once melted, leaving the possibility for large holes and empty spaces. This will cause havoc to foundations, amongst other infrastructure issues.
Grosse explained the advanced tools he uses to conduct his research, including planes equipped with fancy cameras and lasers capable of topographic scanning and satellites that perform similar tasks. When all the information is combined, his team can track changes to the landscape indicating permafrost melt.
Grosse and his peers aren’t keeping their information and studies to themselves. They developed the Arctic Landscape Explorer app, nicknamed ALEX, to share their data with the public. It includes an interactive map that shows all the changes they have noted over their years of research. They hope this tool can prove helpful to individuals and businesses, whether for the construction of new infrastructure and buildings or to help the public understand the changes they are seeing to their subsistence landscape. Although it’s not a feature yet, they hope to give app users the ability to add information and observations to the app. Such citizen science will significantly enhance the reach and understanding of their research.
He hopes more people download the app and participate in understanding this daunting local phenomenon.