The impacts of permafrost thaw in the Arctic 

Permafrost underlies 22 % of the Northern Hemisphere's exposed land surface and is thawing at an alarming rate as a direct consequence of climate change. When thawing, permafrost releases large quantities of organic matter and contaminants into the environment. In addition, permafrost thaw dramatically impacts infrastructure in local communities with wide-ranging consequences for health, economy and society. The EU-funded ILLUQ project will provide an answer to these complex issues. By bringing together an interdisciplinary consortium committed to participatory research with local stakeholders and rightsholders, it will provide the first holistic look at permafrost thaw, pollution, and human and environmental well-being in the Arctic. Moreover, it will deliver information on the risks from contaminant release, infrastructure failure and ecosystem changes to stakeholders.

Work Package 3: Infrastructure

For decades, permafrost served as a solid foundation for infrastructure and as a barrier against contaminants. Thawing permafrost now reduces ground stability and load-bearing capacity and increases erosion along coasts, rivers, and slopes, threatening infrastructure of Arctic communities. This threatens local population health, the ecosystem, and wildlife. Furthermore, damage to infrastructure that is central to cultural life and the basic life functions of communities can lead to psychological and physical threats. In this work package of the ILLUQ Project we address these challenges by assessing the impact of permafrost thaw on critical infrastructure and developing new approaches for infrastructure construction and management that are sustainable, resilient, and adaptable to the changing Arctic environment. This will prioritize the use of protective measures to compensate for permafrost thaw and reduce the risk of hazardous substance release. We will also consider the psychological and social aspects of infrastructure when addressing potential health impacts. 

Thawing industrial legacies in the ArctIc – a threat to permafrost ecosystems

In recent decades, the Arctic and its resources have become an important factor for global economic development. This development has led to diverse and intensive industrial activities in pristine and very sensitive ecosystems. At the same time, this is leading to an increasing accumulation of chemical substances and industrial waste products in the Arctic.  At numerous former and active industrial sites, these substances are stored in the permafrost or have been disposed of there. Global warming and thawing of the permafrost threaten the stability of the subsurface and thus the integrity of numerous storage and disposal sites. This increases the risk of releasing contaminants that threaten both terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems in the Arctic. Furthermore, indigenous communities whose livelihoods and health are closely linked to intact ecosystem functions in the Arctic are directly exposed to these risks. To date, the environmental risks posed by industrial contaminated sites in thawing permafrost areas have not been quantified on a larger scale due to a lack of data or because sensitive information is not freely available.

The purpose of this project is to provide a baseline study allowing to better assess the short- and long-term environmental risks associated with the potential release of contaminated industrial wastes due to permafrost thaw. Therefore, we selected the Mackenzie Delta in Canada's Northwest Territories as the study region, where more than 230 drilling mud sumps were created in permafrost areas during intensive oil and gas exploration, primarily between the 1970s and 1990s. The project will focus on drilling mud sumps as an example of industrial waste disposal in permafrost areas because of the existing research record and the limited number of known contaminants associated with them. This will facilitate rapid logistical implementation of the project and maximize scientific yield prospects. Despite the regional and thematic focus, the project will provide important and transferable knowledge on soil mechanical, thermohydrological and biogeochemical processes for contaminant mobilization in permafrost ecosystems in general. This will provide a new basis for risk assessments at other highly contaminated sites such as mine tailings and landfills.

The grand goal is to deliver essential knowledge allowing a better assessment of the ecological and socioeconomic risks associated with the mobilization and eventual release of industrial legacies in the Mackenzie Delta region due to thawing permafrost. Therefore, we aim to collaborate extensively in a co-creative process with our regional partners the Northwest Territories Geological Survey (NWTGS), Northwest Territories Department of Lands (NWTDL), and local stakeholders such as the Inuvialuit Land Administration (ILA). In addition, we aim to communicate research findings and methodology to local community members, including schools, to promote capacity building and knowledge sharing.

Simulating erosion processes in permafrost landscapes under a warming climate – a risk assessment for ecosystems and infrastructure within the Arctic

Nearly a quarter of the land surface of the Earth's Northern Hemisphere is characterized by permanently frozen ground. The strong warming of the Arctic climate leads to the thawing of permafrost soils, which triggers large-scale changes in the landscape and ecosystems, thereby severely affecting the heat and water cycles of Arctic ecosystems. At the same time, carbon and other nutrients stored in large quantities in permafrost soils are exposed to microbial decomposition during thawing. This decomposition produces greenhouse gases in the soils that can further exacerbate global warming. In addition, thawing reduces the structural stability of soils.

These changes threaten the stability of Arctic ecosystems as well as the infrastructure that is important to life and the economy in the Arctic. Infrastructure such as supply roads, ports, pipelines, airports, and fuel storage facilities are often built directly on highly temperature-sensitive frozen ground. The safety of these infrastructures is directly dependent on the thermal stability of the underlying and surrounding permafrost.

The PermaRisk project aims to provide novel tools for modelling permafrost degradation processes under a warming climate.

Citizen Science Project on mapping
land surface changes in the Arctic

The Arctic is currently heating up more rapidly than the rest of the world, which causes the thawing of frozen soils known as permafrost. The degradation of frozen plant remains releases greenhouse gasses that further increase global warming. Unlike glaciers or sea ice, permafrost is not directly visible on the Earth’s surface and is therefore more difficult to monitor using satellite data. We are therefore researching how to better observe the melting of Arctic soils. With the participation of young citizen scientists, our goal is to collect reliable and current data on permafrost thawing. In this way, climate predictions can be improved.

School classes in Canada and Germany are working together to understand how the Earth’s surface is changing. With the help of drones, young citizen scientists in Aklavik in Northwest Canada collect high-resolution airborne images of the Arctic Earth’s surface. This image data is pre-processed by the project team and divided into small mapping tasks (“micro-tasks”). The tasks are then carried out by young citizen scientists in Germany via smartphone, thus completing an important image processing step. The contribution of citizen scientists will create a unique reference dataset for research. In combination with machine learning methods, this will make large-scale mapping of permafrost structures possible for the first time and simultaneously bring the urgent topic of climate change and permafrost melting into classrooms.

Global warming and the thawing of permafrost not only lead to destabilization of the soil in the permafrost regions of the Arctic, but also to a tendency to increasingly delimit the temporal useability of so-called ice roads. Ice Roads are annual winter transport routes that play an important role in supplying remote Arctic locations. Based on the Tundra Travel Rules, the Ice Roads may only be used under certain ground temperature conditions. The safety and the annual lifetime of these traffic routes are directly affected by the global warming and the shorter frost periods. The time slot within which ice roads may be used has decreased from about 200 days a year to about 100 days a year over the last 40 years.

On the one hand, the predictability of logistics is of utmost importance for companies operating in these hard-to-reach regions. On the other hand, serious and irreparable environmental damage can be caused if transport routes are used beyond a certain thermal stability limit. Reliable and timely risk assessment is therefore crucial from an economic as well as ecological point of view.

The permafrost model CryoGrid, which has been further developed as part of PermaRisk, is intended to help predict the usability and ecological compatibility of the Ice Roads. The CryoGrid model is already technologically able to predict the stability of such transport routes with the help of meteorological data from weather models. As part of this project, our scientific model will be used to develop demonstrator software for transport routes in Alaska.

Physics-Constrained Deep Learning Framework for Quantifying Surface Processes across the Arctic Region

Global climate change is disproportionately affecting the Arctic and accelerating positive climate feedbacks. Land-surface processes linking global climate and Arctic conditions are crucial, but existing models require much computational resources and expertise, with uncertainties remaining. To address this, this project aims for the application new physics-informed deep learning framework to produce high-resolution predictions from low-resolution models and observations. This project aims to test hybrid modeling concepts, to gain better understanding of landscape evolution in the Arctic and Subarctic areas, and mitigating the impacts of climate change.

This project brings together the expertise of data science and physics-based modeling from the Helmholtz Centre Potsdam-GFZ German Research Centre for Geosciences and the Alfred Wegener Institute Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research in a cross-disciplinary effort to contribute new knowledge on the rapid modeling of complex systems.