Scholarly and Creative Works

• Co-led first conceptualization of disproportionate interdisciplinary engagement by women (Rhoten and Pfirman 2007 a,b)

• Led first development of individual and institutional guidance for all stages of interdisciplinary academic careers (Pfirman et al., 2011)

• Led and co-led analyses of issues and options for fostering interdisciplinary scientists (Pfirman et al., 2005, Pfirman and Martin, 2010; Pfirman and Begg, 2012, Martin and Pfirman, 2017, Pfirman et al., 2018)               

• Led practical recommendations for advancing women in science (Pfirman et al. 2007-Science Careers Best of 2007, 2008a-Science Careers Best of 2008,b; 2010-The Best of Science Careers, 2010)

When I became co-PI of the Columbia Earth Institute ADVANCE grant from the National Science Foundation, I took on the role of “fixing the women,” while other colleagues in our team worked on “fixing the system.  In this context, I started reading about what we could do to help female STEM faculty advance and I came across Virginia Valian’s book “Why so Slow.”  As I read, I made notes of all the hurdles women were encountering, and it struck me that many of these also relate to hurdles encountered by those conducting interdisciplinary research.  Fortuitously, around this time I met Diana Rhoten when she gave a presentation on her work to the AC-ERE (see below) on the characteristics of interdisciplinary scholars.  I asked her if she noticed a gender aspect and at first she said no.  But then I met her again about a year later and she said that now she sees it everywhere.  So we decided to collaborate on a paper exploring whether and why that might be the case.

Women in interdisciplinary science: Exploring preferences and consequences

D Rhoten, S Pfirman

Research policy 36 (1), 56-75 2007

Women, Science and Interdisciplinary Ways of Working

D Rhoten, S Pfirman

Inside Higher Ed 2007

Since publishing this, I've been tracking subsequent studies, and most continue to find that women are more engaged in interdisciplinary research, and engaged by interdisciplinary education, but now with the interesting exception of biology.

Interdisciplinarity, gender, and the hierarchy of the sciences

S Pfirman, M Laubichler

Quantitative Science Studies 2023; 4 (4): 898–901. doi: https://doi.org/10.1162/qss_c_00269

At that time I was the president of the Council of Environmental Deans and Directors, and I wanted to bring to people’s attention the issues faced by people navigating interdisciplinary career trajectories – men as well as women.  So we put together a working group that developed a guidance document articulating both issues and options for each stage of the career trajectory.  This analysis led to additional publications with both CEDD and Barnard/Columbia colleagues, providing additional guidance and advice.

Interdisciplinary hiring, tenure and promotion: guidance for individuals and institutions

S Pfirman, P Martin, L Berry, M Fletcher, M Hempel, R Southard, ...

a paper published by the Council of Environmental Deans and Directors 2007

Collaborative efforts: Promoting interdisciplinary scholars

SL Pfirman, JP Collins, S Lowes, AF Michaels

Chronicle of Higher Education 51 (23), B15 2005

To thrive and prosper: Hiring, fostering and tenuring interdisciplinary scholars

SL Pfirman, JP Collins, S Lowes, AF Michaels

Project Kaleidoscope Resource 2005

Facilitating interdisciplinary scholars

S Pfirman, PJS Martin

The Oxford handbook of interdisciplinarity, 387-403 2010

Facilitating interdisciplinary scholars

PJS Martin, S Pfirman

The Oxford Handbook of Interdisciplinarity. 2nd ed. Oxford: OUP, 586-600 2017 (updated version)

Troubled by interdisciplinarity?

S Pfirman, M Begg

Science, April 06 2012

Supporting sustainable human and environmental systems faculty

S Pfirman, RC Smardon, MA Reiter

Education for Sustainable Human and Environmental Systems, 216-227 2018

Also in my role as Columbia Earth Institute ADVANCE co-PI, I started leading workshops with tips to help STEM women succeed in academia.  For the workshops I gathered recommendations from colleagues for how to be more productive, and how to get recognized for your contributions. People really appreciated them so we decided to publish the recommendations in Science Careers.

Maximizing Productivity and Recognition, Part 1: Publication, Citation, and Impact

S Pfirman, P Balsam, R Bell, J Laird, P Culligan

Science 2007, Science Careers Best of 2007

Maximizing productivity and Recognition, Part 2: Collaboration and networking

S Pfirman, P Balsam, RE Bell, P Culligan, JD Laird

Science 1 2008, Science Careers Best of 2008

Maximizing Productivity and Recognition, Part 3: Developing a Research Plan

S Pfirman, RE Bell, PJ Culligan, P Balsam, JD Laird 

Science 2008

I was at a reception at Barnard College and happened to talk with Claude Steele, of Stereotype Threat fame.  I mentioned that I hadn’t noticed much bias when I was younger because I was often invited for presentations and to serve on various committees.  He gave me a look and said, yes, early in his career he was a “pet” too.  That framing as “pet” stuck with me and later I collaborated with other ADVANCE colleagues to explore the difference between being viewed as a pet vs. a peer. 

Perspective: Transitioning from Pet to Peer

S Pfirman, C Block, R Bell, L Roberson, P Culligan

Science 10, 12  2010, The Best of Science Careers, 2010

• Led initial Advisory Committee guidance to the National Science Foundation for Environmental Research and Education including first 10-year outlook for NSF environmental research and education for the National Science Foundation (Pfirman, et al., 2003)

• Led/co-led Kahoot! online quiz campaigns in 2018 focused on Climate Change, 2019 focused on Sustainability, and 2023 focused on Global Futures

  • Reaching >3.7 million players, >180 countries

  • First research analyzing player responses (Pfirman et al., 2021)

• Co-led Global Warming: Understanding the Forecast exhibition at the American Museum of Natural History, opening at AMNH in 1992 and closing at the Smithsonian in 1996

  • Curatorial Award for Excellence

  • First > $1 million climate education grant from NSF

• Co-led first opening of the Human Habitat to visitors, including installation of “Climate Change and Life on Earth” exhibition at Biosphere 2 Center (1996)

• Co-led development of the Columbia/Barnard introductory Earth's Environmental Systems courses required for undergraduate environmental majors, including leading the EES: Climate course starting in 1996 (Pfirman and Winckler, 2023)

• Co-led research on using alternate reality game player responses to understand participant perceptions of climate change (Orlove et al., 2024)

• Led creation of "Bridging the Valley of Wasted Knowledge" video (Pfirman et al.,  2019)

• Co-led development of the River Summer program on the Hudson River

• Led first conceptualization of the Arctic’s Last Sea Ice Refuge, later renamed by WWF the Last Ice Area, including leading first proposal for development of Arctic sea ice protected areas (Pfirman et al., 2008, 2009, 2010a,b), and contributing to research characterizing the ice shed dynamics (Newton et al., 2021)

• Co-chair of the National Academy of Sciences study "The Arctic in the Anthropocene: Emerging Research Questions in the Arctic" (2014)

  • • Nearly 8,000 downloads

    • #3 of 98 outputs of similar age from the National Academies Press, scoring higher than 97% of its contemporaries

• Co-led scoping of potential International Polar Year 2007-2009 education and outreach programs (Pfirman et al., 2004), and contributed to the National Academy study of IPY legacies (Brigham-Grette et al., 2012)

• Co-led "A 5C Arctic in a 2C World" workshop and briefing paper (Schlosser, Pfirman et al. 2016)

• Co-led workshop and publication "White Arctic vs. Blue Arctic" (Newton, Pfirman et al. 2016)

• Led/co-led development of EcoChains games along with research on learning gains

  • EcoChains: Arctic Futures, digital game, > 20,000 plays

  • EcoChains: Irrituruami Taimanigu, digital and card games, Inupiat version

  • EcoChains: Arctic Life, card game-2017 Parents Choice award

  • EcoChains: Arctic Crisis, original card game

  • Research on stickier learning demonstrated through game play (Pfirman et al., 2021)

  • Research on the impact of gameplay vs. reading on mental models of social-ecological systems (O'Garra et al., 2021)

• Led development of the role-playing game Arctic SMARTIC: Strategic Management of Resources in Times of Change Pfirman et al., 2016)

• Led analysis of the fates of expeditions led by Fridtjof Nansen and Sir Ernest Shackleton during the Heroic Age of Polar Exploration (Pfirman et al., 2009)

In 2008 we had a poster at the American Geophysical Union’s Annual Meeting (AGU) where we mapped out key sea ice areas – including where sea ice would last the longest in a warming world.  In that initial poster, we also laid out the possibility that this region, north of the Canadian Arctic Archipelago and Greenland, could be managed as a World Heritage Site.  We tried to get this published, but were rejected by Science because they didn’t think that it was of broad enough interest!  I pushed back with the editor trying to articulate the implications, but to no avail.  We then incorporated the concept in our February 2009 International Polar Year programming, where we had a poster and hands-on demonstration, and also where we invited Pete Ewins, WWF to give a talk.  Once Pete saw the concept represented in our presentation, he suggested that we write it up for WWF’s publication, The Circle.  We did so and we also proposed it as another, more targeted poster for the 2010 AGU meeting.  AGU wound up deciding to do a press conference on it: we were one of only a few presentations picked for this attention, the Mars Rover was another one.  The press conference generated a lot of media attention and the concept wound up being picked up by WWF as a major initiative under the title of the Last Ice Area.  WWF then worked with local Indigenous communities and the Canadian government to make it happen.  Ten years after first scientific conceptualization, it became a reality: in 2019 Canada announced the formation of the Tuvaijuittuq Marine Protected Area, translation: the place where ice never melts.  It is the 10th largest marine protected area in the world, listed just after the Great Barrier Reef.  This is the most significant achievement of my career, and was in collaboration with Bruno Tremblay and Bob Newton.

Creating Arctic Sea Ice Protected Areas?

S Pfirman, K Hoff, B Tremblay, C Fowler

AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts 2008, U13C-0075 2008

The Last Arctic Sea Ice Refuge (article)

S Pfirman, L.B. Tremblay, R. Newton & C. Fowler 

The Circle, 2009

The last Arctic sea ice refuge (press conference video)

S Pfirman, LB Tremblay, C Fowler, R Newton 2010

The Last Arctic Sea Ice Refuge (abstract)

S Pfirman, L.B. Tremblay, R. Newton & C. Fowler 

AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts C43E-0592, 2010

Arctic Wildlife's Last Habitat Will Be Ice Strip

Tim Folger

National Geographic, 2018

Defining the “ice shed” of the Arctic Ocean's Last Ice Area and its future evolution

R Newton, S Pfirman, LB Tremblay, P DeRepentigny

Earth's Future 9 (9), e2021EF001988  2021

Following the major Arctic sea ice losses of 2007 and 2012, it was clear that the Arctic was changing first and fastest -- with global as well as regional and local implications.  Seeking to mobilize resources towards considering actions, we organized a workshop spanning academia, NGOs, federal agencies, and think tanks.  A key takeaway from the workshop was that, counter-intuitively, maintaining a white Arctic is almost universally critical for global populations, while within the Arctic perspectives are somewhat more mixed -- with a tendency towards preferring a "gray" Arctic (as one of my students called it) with somewhat less ice than the 1980s.

White Arctic vs. Blue Arctic: A case study of diverging stakeholder responses to environmental change

R Newton, S Pfirman, P Schlosser, B Tremblay, M Murray, R Pomerance

Earth's Future 4 (8), 396-405 2016

The success of the White Arctic/Blue Arctic workshop led us to host a follow up workshop, this time with more international participants, and specifically exploring the need and options for action including carbon capture and solar radiation modification, along with emissions reductions.  Engaging in such interventions was controversial in the academic and NGO communities.  I saw this first-hand when we started talking about the Last Ice Area and people criticized me for lessening pressure on the need to reduce emissions -- i.e. we should only talk about mitigation, we shouldn't talk about adaptation as that was seen as fatalist.  Once it became clear that things are changing so fast that we can't ignore adaptation, the next "moral hazard" was geoengineering.  But in Paris in 2015 the need for carbon capture was built into the 1.5 degree target and it was clear that the Arctic community needed to come to grips which what that could mean for the Arctic.

A 5 C Arctic in a 2 C World: Challenges and Recommendations for Immediate Action

P Schlosser, SL Pfirman, R Pomerance, M Williams, B Ack, P Duffy, ...2016

The Arctic highlights our failure to act in a rapidly changing world

P Schlosser, H Eicken, V Metcalf, S Pfirman, MS Murray, C Edwards

Sustainability 14 (3), 1882 2022

As a member of the National Academy of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine's Polar Research Board, I was asked to chair this study.  It was really neat to be able to make available to the research community and the public, data that had been collected by the US intelligence community and the Defense Department.

Scientific value of Arctic sea ice imagery derived products

S Pfirman, et al.

National Academies Press.  2009

Serving on the Polar Research Board in the time leading up to, during, and after the International Polar Year (IPY: 2007-2009, me on the PRB: 2006-2010) was a great experience as so many scientific and educational resources were mobilized and it was such a time of change, with the major sea ice loss in 2007.  In reflecting on the legacies of the IPY, two key aspects come to mind: first -- engagement of early career scientists: before this the polar community had been aging, and second -- the realization that the polar had to engage proactively in transferring knowledge for action: it is too urgent for us to just do our research and then wait to see if any decision-maker would find it to be useful.  Also, it was fun that a reflection that I originally conducted with my students characterizing the past and future Arctic and Antarctic, made its way into the study -- of course with edits!

Lessons and Legacies of International Polar Year 2007-2008

J Brigham-Grette, RA Bindschadler, M Albert, JJ Cassano, LD Hinzman, ...  2012

It was an honor to be asked to co-chair this Polar Research Board study.  The IPY clearly showed that the Arctic was transitioning in new and complex ways, and that we needed to rise to the challenges with new approaches.  My favorite part about this analysis is the introductory categorization of different types of knowledge and why they are important to assess using multiple approaches.

The Arctic in the Anthropocene: Emerging research questions.

HP Huntington, S Pfirman, C Ashjian, L Bourgeau-Chavez, JA Francis, ...

The National Academies Press., 210  2014

99th percentile -- in the top 5% of all research outputs ever tracked by Altmetric

#3 of 98 outputs of similar age from the National Academies Press

Recently we put together an international team of editors for a special issue of Sustainability on Shaping Tomorrow's Arctic.  This collection of publications contains a wide range of perspectives, from senior scientists to early career Indigenous scholars, with a focus on mobilizing our responsibility for stewarding the Arctic into equitable futures.

Shaping Tomorrow’s Arctic

S Pfirman, G Fondahl, GK Hovelsrud, T Mustonen

Sustainability 15 (4), 3732  2023

I was a member and as well as chair (1998-1999) of NSF's Office of Polar Programs Office Advisory Committee from 1997-2000, during the time that NSF first implemented the Broader Impacts Criterion #2.  We heard from the polar community that they were having a hard time figuring out how to meet the goals of the new criterion, so we put together a working group to develop and post what turned out to be the first set of Broader Impact examples.

Working Group on Implementation of Review Criterion #2 (link no longer active: http://www.nsf.gov/od/opp/opp_advisory/oaccrit2.htm)

S Pfirman, M Albert, J Carlstrom, J Priscu, M Cameron, J Palais, J Dionne 2001 

The polar community came together in the years leading up to the International Polar Year of 2007-2009 to scope out recommendations for programming.  I co-led a preparatory workshop in Washington, DC on what we could do with education to broaden impact.  This came in part from my background working on the Global Warming exhibition with AMNH, as well as my work on translating the Broader Impacts criterion into practical guidance.  Clearly assuming a DC framing, the signs the workshop venue posted originally were “Bridging the Polls” instead of “Bridging the Poles” ;).  One of my key takeaways from this experience was that if you set up the workshop structure thoughtfully, you can get a lot of input from the participants in a short period of time.  We had intro panels for each topic, and then breakouts, with thematic tables where participants made recommendations.  For example, one topic focused on education for different levels, K (kindergarten) through gray (lifelong learning), another focused on topics (terrestrial, marine, atmospheric), etc.  I’ve used this approach ever since because it’s such a great way to get rapid and diverse input.  And it also builds community, since you keep meeting different people with interests similar to yours.  My other key takeaway is that there are a lot of people who are fascinated by the poles, and so the poles can be used to connect with people on science and other topics. Specifically, a comment from a TV producer at the Bridging the Poles workshop stayed with me – he said something along the lines that in his experience he’s marveled at how people have an innate, almost unreasonable, interest in the poles. This led to my proposals to NSF for the International Polar Weekends that we held at the American Museum of Natural History, in NYC as well as our later Climate Change Education Partnership proposal.

Bridging the Poles: Education Linked with Research: A Report on the Workshop: 23-25 June 2004, Washington, DC

SL Pfirman, RE Bell, MJ Turrin, P Maru  2004

In 2010 NSF came out with a special request for proposals for Climate Education: Climate Change Education Partnerships (CCEP).  Remembering the comment from the TV producer about the public’s visceral interest in the poles, made me think that it would be effective to teach climate change through the lens of the poles.  My experience talking with thousands of visitors to AMNH for our International Polar Weekends also convinced me that we need to enlist novel approaches to reach people – including current decision-makers – through informal education, and not just work through classrooms which focus on educating future generations. So building on connections made during IPY as well as my time chairing NSF’s AC-ERE, I put together a team of people who would be fun to work with, and who were interested in developing novel educational approaches.  Speaking of fun, during a pre-award review, we were asked how we would define “fun.”  Scrambling for an answer to this odd question, I replied that fun means something that you keep doing, even though you should be doing something else.  We wound up being funded for 9 years, (CCEP I for 2 years, and CCEP II for 6 years plus a no funds extension).  It was a terrific experience.  I learned a lot about how to lead multi-institutional and cross-disciplinary projects, and our products received a lot of attention, several awards, and wound up reaching millions of people and along the way producing some significant research findings.  

“Stickier” learning through gameplay: An effective approach to climate change education

S Pfirman, T O’Garra, E Bachrach Simon, J Brunacini, D Reckien, JJ Lee, ...

Journal of Geoscience Education 69 (2), 192-206 2021

Impact of gameplay vs. reading on mental models of social-ecological systems: a fuzzy cognitive mapping approach

T O'Garra, D Reckien, S Pfirman, E Bachrach Simon, GH Bachman, ...

Ecology and Society 26 (2) 2021

Polar fun and games

M Turrin, S Pfirman, L Hamilton

Current: The Journal of Marine Education 34 (1), 9  2020

EcoChains: Arctic Futures digital game

Pfirman, S and J.J. Lee, 2022. EcoChains: Arctic Futures, Ask a Biologist, https://askabiologist.asu.edu/games-and-simulations/ecochains 

EcoChains: A Multiplayer Card Game to Teach Food Webs, Climate Change and Systems Thinking

JJ Lee, S Pfirman, T Toynton, E Matamoros

etc press, 480

Arctic Educational Resources (all free)

Games

• • • EcoChains games

  • EcoChains: Arctic Futures, digital game, > 64,000 plays

    • • EcoChains: Irrituruami Taimanigu, digital game, Inupiat

      • EcoChains: Arctic Life, print-and-play card game, Parents Choice award, 2017

        • LiveScience video

  • EcoChains: Arctic Futures, print-and-play card game, Inupiat and English

  • EcoChains: Arctic Crisis, card game (out of stock)

  • EcoChains: Antarctic Life, card game (out of stock)

• Role-playing game Arctic SMARTIC: Strategic Management of Resources in Times of Change (S Pfirman, P Callahan, J Brunacini. 2016 updated by the ARC-NAV team 2024). CAMEL Climate Change Education

• ice*ice*arctic card game (Pfirman, 2023)

Demonstration

• Polar Weekend: Shrinking Arctic Sea Ice

Tool

• SITU: The Sea Ice Tracking Utility (Firefox, Edge, not Chrome)

Overview and Case Studies

User Options including Data Downloads

Changing Life in the Arctic: Ask a Biologist Website (AAB)

• Arctic Food Webs 

• Arctic Climate Change 

• Peoples of Alaska

  1. • The Arctic Needs Your Help

This one is not important, but it is one of my favorites.  After teaching “Exploring the Poles” to Barnard undergraduates for years, where I sent students on simulated expeditions using LITS (Lagrangian Ice Tracking System -- later revamped and renamed SITU: the Sea Ice Tracking Utility), we decided to publish likely ice trajectories for both Nansen's and Shackleton's expeditions based on data from the past several decades.  We also modeled the sailing conditions for Shackleton’s boat journey.  One of the coolest moments in this analysis was when I read in Shackleton's navigator Worsley’s journal about his observation of seeing all this debris from foundered ships on the beach near where they landed on the island of South Georgia.  This finding confirmed what we had predicted about ocean currents.  But then we learned after we published it that the article was behind a paywall and that most libraries didn’t have subscriptions.  I was really disappointed until, just by chance, I was looking for it later, and saw that American Scientist had decided on their own to put it in front of the paywall.  Not only that, but they did a beautiful job of producing it – integrating historical photographs in a compelling way.

Going with the floe? An analysis of luck versus skill in the epic polar expeditions of Fridtjof Nansen and Sir Ernest Shackleton

S Pfirman, B Tremblay, C Fowler

American Scientist 97 (6), 484-494  2009

Gavin Schmidt asked me to contribute a chapter about Arctic change for his book on climate change.  It was the first time that I tried this type of writing and I wasn’t sure how to go about it.  So while on vacation in the Adirondacks, I woke up each morning and just wrote, almost stream of consciousness.  It turned out that I wound up finishing more quickly than most other chapter contributors.  I was surprised and pleased when I later learned that they had sent my chapter to the other chapter writers as an example, saying that this was what they were looking for.  I was even more pleased when I checked out the book on Amazon and saw that they used my chapter as a teaser.  

“Changes in the North,” Chapter 2 in Climate Change: Picturing the Science. 

S Pfirman, Editors: G Schmidt, J Wolfe, W.W. Norton & Co. 320 pp  2009

• Led and co-developed the first dynamic depictions of sea ice age and origin, first to identify major decrease in sea ice age (Pfirman and Haxby 2000, Pfirman et al. 2004)

• Led development of first sea ice trajectory analysis to track and validate origin and fate of sea ice (Pfirman et al. 1997)

• Led conceptualization of potential for pollutant transport by sea ice (Pfirman et al. 1995) 

• Co-led development of resources to track sea ice: led validation of first sea ice tracker, (Pfirman et al.,1997), co-led development of first publicly available sea ice tracker (LITS), co-led addition of future sea ice scenarios to public sea ice tracker (SITU), led development of the public SITU tool for research, education and outreach (Pfirman et al., 2019)

• Led conceptualization of sediment transport by and release from high Arctic sea ice (Pfirman et al., 1989a,b, 1990)

• Co-led analysis of increasing transnational sea-ice exchange in a changing Arctic Ocean (Newton, Pfirman et al. 2017) 

• Led development of sea ice as an archive to reconstruct surface ocean conditions (Pfirman et al. 2004)

• Led characterization of transport and transformation of Atlantic water in the Barents Sea, (Pfirman et al., 1994)

• Led analysis of basal meltwater plume input and dispersal from a post-surge tidewater glacier (Pfirman, 1985, Ph.D. thesis; Pfirman and Solheim, 1989)

• Co-led characterization of surging tidewater glacier sea floor morphology and sedimentation (Pfirman, 1985, Ph.D. thesis; Solheim and Pfirman, 1985)

Working together with Bill Haxby, in 1999-2000 we created the first animation showing changes in Arctic sea ice age over time.  This animation clearly showed how sea ice was getting younger, and therefore also likely to be thinner and thus more susceptible to faster thinning with future warming.  This is the most significant scientific discovery of my career.

Animation of Arctic sea ice origin and age (no longer posted)

S Pfirman, WF Haxby 2000

Ice Age

Ice Origin

Variability in Arctic sea ice drift

S Pfirman, WF Haxby, R Colony, I Rigor

Geophysical Research Letters 31 (16)  2004

Sampling sediments – as well as ice, organisms or pollutants – from drifting sea ice, makes you wonder where the ice came from.  So we developed a method to backtrack drifting sea ice samples back to their points of origin, often on the Siberian shelves.  This helps in understanding of what is entrained in sea ice and why, as well as where the ice is likely to melt and release water and other materials to the ocean surface.

Reconstructing the origin and trajectory of drifting Arctic sea ice

SL Pfirman, R Colony, D Nürnberg, H Eicken, I Rigor

Journal of Geophysical Research: Oceans 102 (C6), 12575-12586  1997

Particle-laden Eurasian Arctic sea ice: observations from July and August 1987

S Pfirman, JC Gascard, I Wollenburg, P Mudie, A Abelmann

Polar Research 7 (1), 59-66  1989

Lithogenic sediment on Arctic pack ice: Potential aeolian flux and contribution to deep sea sediments

S Pfirman, I Wollenburg, J Thiede, MA Lange

Paleoclimatology and paleometeorology: modern and past patterns of global …  1989

Sea ice characteristics and the role of sediment inclusions in deep-sea deposition: Arctic—Antarctic comparisons

S Pfirman, MA Lange, I Wollenburg, P Schlosser

Geological history of the polar oceans: Arctic versus Antarctic, 187-211  1990

This is one of my favorites and at the time I published it thought that it would be significant.  Even one of the reviewers referred to it as “seminal.”  But shortly after publication, we had the major sea ice loss of 2007, and it was no longer as important to have a remote way of monitoring interior Arctic conditions – it was just as easy to go there. At any rate, here is the background: once we figured out how to backtrack ice drift trajectories, and could pull temperature from databases along the trajectories, we realized that we could model ice growth along the trajectories, and therefore we could use sea ice as an archive of surface ocean conditions, specifically oxygen isotope values, which are important for understanding the Arctic freshwater budget.  Input of freshwater from sea ice melt and rivers can influence where ice forms, therefore where salt will be excluded during ice formation, and therefore where density can be added to drive thermohaline circulation.  All we had to do was input the temperature along the trajectory (and make some assumptions about snow cover) to determine ice growth rates.  

Drifting Arctic sea ice archives changes in ocean surface conditions

S Pfirman, W Haxby, H Eicken, M Jeffries, D Bauch

Geophysical Research Letters 31 (19)  2004

Ever since I first started working with sea ice, I realized that we needed a publicly available, easy-to-use tool to track not only the ice, but also the environmental conditions along the trajectories.  Early on I worked with data from the International Arctic Buoy Programme (IABP), but once satellite data started to be used for ice tracking, I shifted to working with colleagues at the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC).  The original tool, LITS – for Lagrangian Ice Tracking System – was clearly developed by and for us as scientists.  Once at ASU, I enlisted ETX (Center of Education through Exploration) to help create an interface that is both more attractive, and user-friendly.  The result is SITU: The Sea Ice Tracking Utility, which is now hosted on the NSIDC website.

Lagrangian Ice Tracking System: LITS Expanded with Arctic and Antarctic Environmental Data

S Pfirman, G. C. Campbell, B. Tremblay; R. Newton, W. Meier,

American Geophysical Union, Fall Meeting 2019, abstract #C22D-03 2019

SITU: The Sea Ice Tracking Utility (Firefox, Edge, not Chrome)

GG Campbell, S Pfirman, B Tremblay, R Newton, W Meier, C Fowler, ...

NSIDC 2020 

Overview and Case Studies

User options

In conjunction with our work on the Last Ice Area, we realized that changes in the transport of sea ice into and out of the Exclusive Economic Zones of Arctic States was important to project, in order to develop better approaches to avoid conflict and steward the Arctic into the future.

Increased Transnational Sea Ice Transport Between Neighboring Arctic States in the 21st Century

P DeRepentigny, A Jahn, LB Tremblay, R Newton, S Pfirman

Earth's Future 8 (3), e2019EF001284  2020

Increasing transnational sea‐ice exchange in a changing Arctic Ocean

R Newton, S Pfirman, B Tremblay, P DeRepentigny

Earth's Future 5 (6), 633-647  2017

Patterns of sea ice retreat in the transition to a seasonally ice-free Arctic

P DeRepentigny, LB Tremblay, R Newton, S Pfirman

Journal of Climate 29 (19), 6993-7008  2016

Hardly anyone has cited these analyses but I think that they were significant in calling attention to the impact of small changes in albedo on melting of snow and ice, and how the particle-laden ice can darken over time through ablation as well as melting.  Later articles by others addressed the importance of this for the future of the Greenland Ice sheet.

The impact of sediment-laden snow and sea ice in the arctic on climate

T Shapiro Ledley, S Pfirman

Climatic change 37 (4), 641-664 1997

Potential Consequences Of “Dirty” Arctic Sea Ice

S Pfirman, MA Lange, TS Ledley

Annals of Glaciology 14, 355-355  1990

I first got interested in transport of contaminants in the Arctic when I asked a colleague why they were seeing such large concentrations of PCBs in polar bears.  He said, well, they’re either coming in through the ocean or the atmosphere.  To me, that was a huge range of options, which implied very different things about system functioning.  And it made me wonder if maybe sea ice could play a role since most of the polar bears with high levels of PCBs were located along marginal ice zones (MIZ).  So could sea ice be transporting contaminants, and releasing them when the ice melts, injecting them directly into surface waters where they can be taken up in the highly productive MIZ ecosystem?  We were the first to explore this exposure pathway, which is unique in collecting and concentrating contaminants and then releasing/injecting them exactly where they could do the most damage: the spring and summer surface waters of the highly productive marginal ice zone. 

The potential transport of pollutants by Arctic sea ice

SL Pfirman, H Eicken, D Bauch, WF Weeks

Science of the Total Environment 159 (2-3), 129-146  1995

Hydrographic structure and variability of the Kara Sea: Implications for pollutant distribution

VK Pavlov, SL Pfirman

Deep Sea Research Part II: Topical Studies in Oceanography 42 (6), 1369-1390  1995

The role of the large-scale Arctic Ocean circulation in the transport of contaminants

P Schlosser, JH Swift, D Lewis, SL Pfirman

Deep Sea Research Part II: Topical Studies in Oceanography 42 (6), 1341-1367 1995

Potential for rapid transport of contaminants from the Kara Sea

SL Pfirman, JW Kögeler, I Rigor

Science of the Total Environment 202 (1-3), 111-122  1997

New satellite derived sea ice motion tracks Arctic contamination

WJ Emery, C Fowler, J Maslanik, S Pfirman

Marine pollution bulletin 35 (7-12), 345-352  1997

Pathways and mean residence times of dissolved pollutants in the ocean derived from transient tracers and stable isotopes

P Schlosser, R Bayer, G Bönisch, LW Cooper, B Ekwurzel, WJ Jenkins, ...

Science of the Total Environment 237, 15-30  1999

Radionuclides in Arctic sea ice: Tracers of sources, fates and ice transit time scales

P Masqué, JK Cochran, DJ Hirschberg, D Dethleff, D Hebbeln, A Winkler, ...

Deep Sea Research Part I: Oceanographic Research Papers 54 (8), 1289-1310 2007

From 1977-1979 I worked for the US Geological Survey (USGS) in Woods Hole, MA, on a program characterizing oceanographic conditions at potential oil lease sites along the East Coast of the United States.  There I learned how to map water masses and analyze their flow patterns.  I brought that knowledge to my PhD where I needed to understand the local hydrography in order to understand where glacial meltwater sediments could be transported.  Since I had the equipment with me to analyze conditions close to the glacier ice cap, I decided to take stations as well throughout the entire region of the expeditions, along with the sediment coring that we were doing to understand the broader geologic context.  In these analyses of the Barents and Kara seas, I was especially interested in being able to distinguish between the two branches of warm Atlantic inflow.  It was fun to read articles that Nansen had published almost a century before about his related oceanographic findings.

The northern Barents Sea: water mass distribution and modification

S Pfirman, D Bauch, T Gammelsrød

AGU (American Geophysical Union) Monographs  1994

Coastal environments of the western Kara and eastern Barents Seas

SL Pfirman, J Kogeler, B Anselme

Deep Sea Research Part II: Topical Studies in Oceanography 42 (6), 1391-1412 1995

Sea ice isotopic characteristics – which I worked on for the sea ice as an archive paper described above – are important in being able to partition Arctic freshwater into its various components, which are primarily river runoff and sea ice melt. 

Tracer studies of the Arctic freshwater budget

P SCHLOSSER¹, B Ekwurzel, S KHATIWALA¹, B NEWTON¹, W Maslowski, ...

The Freshwater Budget of the Arctic Ocean 70, 453 2012

This paper came from a research project that I worked on before I began my PhD thesis.  I remember being excited to see how my mapping of subseabed structures came together to show a pattern of glacier meltwater flow established during the last Ice Age.  

Holocene sedimentation in the shallow nearshore zone off Nauset Inlet, Cape Cod, Massachusetts

DG Aubrey, DC Twichell, SL Pfirman

Marine Geology 47 (3-4), 243-259 1982

This is my PhD thesis publication, and the following set of articles – along with the one above on the oceanography of the Barents Sea – are largely based on research conducted during field programs that occurred during that time.  The reason why several of them were not published until 1989, even though I defended in 1984, is because I began working for the US House of Representatives as a staff scientist immediately – even before I defended my thesis.

Modern Sedimentation in the Northern Barents Sea: Input, Dispersal and Deposition of Suspended Sediments from Glacial Meltwater.

SL Pfirman

WOODS HOLE OCEANOGRAPHIC INSTITUTION MA  1985

Sea-floor morphology outside a grounded, surging glacier; Bråsvellbreen, Svalbard

A Solheim, SL Pfirman

Marine Geology 65 (1-2), 127-143  1985

Glaciomarine sedimentation in epicontinental seas exemplified by the northern Barents Sea

A Elverhøi, SL Pfirman, A Solheim, BB Larssen

Marine Geology 85 (2-4), 225-250  1989

Subglacial meltwater discharge in the open-marine tidewater glacier environment: observations from Nordaustlandet, Svalbard Archipelago

SL Pfirman, A Solheim

Marine geology 86 (4), 265-281  1989

During my time working for the USGS, I manually coded the time lapse photography that forms the basis of this article.  This meant scrolling through hundreds or maybe thousands? of photos noting what the seafloor conditions looked like.  The highlight of this experience was whenthe camera captured a giant turtle!  We realized then what caused the marks on the tripod’s current meter – the turtle must have bitten it.

Long-Term Observations Of Bottom Conditions And Sediment Movement On The Atlantic Continental Shelf: Time-Lapse Photography From Instrumented Tripods.

B Butman, CG Bryden, SL Pfirman, WJ Strahle, MA Noble

Unknown Host Publication Title, 414-415

Ever since my work with the USGS, sediment transport was my thing.  For this brief paper I coded seafloor characteristics, looking for where and why sediment was being mobilized.  This note presents highlights, but I did a larger analysis that I think I never published which also shows a large sediment drift in the southwestern Greenland Sea.  I had planned to name it after Louise Arner Boyd, a pioneering woman who led scientific expeditions to the East Greenland waters in the 1930s.

Sediment distribution of the Greenland Sea and the Fram Strait

S Pfirman

Polar research 5 (3), 319-320  1987

While in college, I was fascinated by metamorphic petrology.  I later shifted to sediment transport but was still interested in “hotter” geologic processes so it was fun for me to dive into plate tectonics in writing this article.

Bathymetry of Molloy Deep: Fram Strait between Svalbard and Greenland

J Thiede, S Pfirman, HW Schenke, W Reil

Marine Geophysical Researches 12, 197-214  1990

While looking at side-scan sonar data in the Barents Sea for my PhD thesis, I saw this really interesting feature where pockmarks were lined up in iceberg scours on the seafloor.  Clearly the gas was ready and waiting to be released after the sediment was disturbed.  This finding of gas prevailing in Arctic sediments was in mind as we wrote this paper.

Methane-generated (?) pockmarks on young, thickly sedimented oceanic crust in the Arctic: Vestnesa ridge, Fram strait

PR Vogt, K Crane, E Sundvor, MD Max, SL Pfirman

Geology 22 (3), 255-258  1994

This brief paper is meaningful to me because on one of my Barents Sea expeditions, we stopped in Hinlopen Strait to do a long station for the biologists, and I had a chance to go ashore and climb to the summit of an island, maybe the only person to ever do this, as well as snorkel in a dry suit from the ship – where I could peer under the sea ice floes.  Both were memorable experiences!  Then, when I later looked into the sea floor sediments that are the focus of this article, the structure was really puzzling until I realized that I was probably looking at sediments that were dumped into the strait through glacial melt out from a medial moraine.

Morphology, geology and oceanography of the Hinlopen Strait and Trough, Svalbard, Norway

S Pfirman, JD Milliman

Polar research 5 (3), 297-298