As the Arctic climate warms, permafrost begins to thermally degrade. Transformation of this frozen layer of earth triggers changes in every aspect of surface water and energy in the Arctic. While the region experiences warming, permafrost becomes thinner, and its extent in the boreal forest shrinks. Alterations to permafrost also influence the look of the northern landscape and the region's climatology. In short, warming climate and thawing permafrost create changes to the entire hydrological cycle in Alaska.

Five scientists from the Geophysical Institute at the University of Alaska Fairbanks (UAF) will lead sessions at the International Geophysical and Remote Sensing Symposium (IGARSS), September 20 through 24 at the Egan Convention Center in Anchorage. Drawing hundreds of scientists and engineers from across the globe, IGARSS is the premier international conference on remote sensing—a term used to describe the use of satellites and other airborne tools to measure everything from acreage burned during wildfires to the location of ash clouds spit up by volcanoes. At IGARSS, users of the technology will meet to discuss the latest instruments, techniques and programs used around the world.

The Geophysical Institute at the University of Alaska Fairbanks is saddened to learn of the death of Karoline Frey, a 27-year-old graduate student with the instituteʼs snow, ice and permafrost group. Frey, a native of Altensteig, Germany, died on March 24 after falling into a crevasse on a small glacier on Item Peak in the Alaska Range. Frey was on a spring break skiing vacation with a group of friends at the time of the accident.

A few years ago, Ronald Daanen was driving north of Coldfoot on the Dalton Highway, looking for drunken trees. He pulled over when he saw some tipsy spruce on a hillside. The University of Alaska Fairbanks scientist thought the tilted trees would be a classic sign of thawing permafrost, ground that has remained frozen through the heat of at least two summers. But these trees were part of something larger — a giant tongue of moving hillside that was oozing toward the Dalton Highway. When covered in snow, the mass looks like a glacier covered with trees, but it’s not a glacier. Nor is it a rock glacier, a mass of rock and ice that slowly slips down mountains (there are several in the Alaska Range and the Wrangells). Permafrost scientists have found three of them close to the road near Coldfoot and have seen several more along the highway south of Atigun Pass. Using Google imagery, they have found many more in the same area. Retired USGS geologist Tom Hamilton saw the same features as he mapped the geology of the area in the 1970s. Hamilton called them “flow slides.” Daanen and Guido Grosse of the University of Alaska Fairbanks’ Geophysical Institute are calling the features “debris flows.” In a paper they recently co-wrote, the scientists describe the phenomena as “an unusual form of mass movement.” On a trip north a few springs ago, Daanen, Grosse and others punched through wet snowpack and climbed up on the lobes. They found huge cracks in the ground. Some of the trees were split at the base. The clues told them that the hill upon which they stood was moving, probably after a long period during which it didn’t budge (which allowed the spruce to grow tall there, at the northern edge of where spruce exist in Alaska).