Event Type
Webinars and Virtual Events
Event Dates
2020-08-06
Location
Online: 9:00-11:00 am AKDT, 1:00-3:00 pm EDT

You are invited to take place in the virtual mini-symposium on "Advances in Permafrost Modeling", originally scheduled to take place at the SIAM Conference on Mathematics of Planet Earth (MPE20). You can join the talks via Zoom.

The synopsis:

Over the past decade, the Arctic has warmed at about twice the rate of the rest of the globe. As a result, the Arctic has shifted to a new normal. This new normal includes rapid thawing of permafrost. Permafrost ecosystems contain billions of tons of organic carbon trapped in frozen soil. Thawing permafrost is potentially releasing globally-relevant quantities of greenhouse gases in a process termed the permafrost climate feedback. Recent model estimates of net permafrost greenhouse gas release do not agree in magnitude or even sign, demonstrating that current modeling frameworks still cannot account for internal and external complexities in this system. Fundamentally, permafrost thaw is a phase transition phenomenon, such as a solid turning into a liquid, albeit on large regional scales and over a period of time which depends on environmental forcing and complex interactions among surface collapse, hydrology, and vegetation. It may, therefore, be fruitful to investigate permafrost degradation in ways that are mathematically analogous to related phenomena in phase transition theory. In this mini-symposium, we present the speakers from mathematics as well from geoscience to discuss how mathematics helps to advance permafrost and permafrost ecosystem models and how permafrost modeling may be urging newly discovers in phase transition theory.

The full information about this event, zoom link, and materials can be found on the web-page.