Past Events

Update:

We at UArctic, together with the local host organizations in Iceland, have made the difficult decision to postpone the UArctic Congress (originally scheduled to take place in Reykjavik Oct 6-8, 2020) until May 2021 in conjunction with the Arctic Council Ministerial.

Please follow this link for more information.

UArctic Congress 2020 will be hosted by all UArctic higher education members in Iceland. The event is part of Iceland’s chairmanship of the Arctic Council and organized in conjunction with the Arctic Circle Assembly.

The themes of the Congress follow those of the Icelandic chairmanship's priorities:

• Arctic Marine Environment
• Climate and Green Energy Solutions
• People and Communities in the Arctic

The UArctic Congress 2020 brings together institutional leaders, indigenous representatives, academics, scientists and students from around the Circumpolar North and beyond. It is an excellent platform for all UArctic members to engage with each other and promote cooperation in circumpolar science and higher education. Together with partners, policy makers and other actors, the UArctic Congress strives to take the Arctic agenda forward by creating and strengthening collaborations that produce new findings and solutions for the future of the Arctic.

The deadline for session proposals is January 31, 2020.

The annual Polar CORDEX workshop in 2020 will be held online on 5-7 October (each day 2 hours 15-17 UTC).

Please register for the meeting by September 25, 2020, at:
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSc3OYnEvCZx65tlq-WbLN8-9ouz8bf…

The invitation to the zoom meeting will be sent to all registered colleagues in advance of the meeting.

The meeting will address the following topics:

• 5 Oct - Arctic CORDEX updates and plans
• 6 Oct - Antarctic CORDEX updates and plans
• 7 Oct - Polar CORDEX next steps

Due to COVID-19, the CryoSat 10th Anniversary Science Conference has been rescheduled to take place 14-17 June 2021, in Taormina (Sicily).

Over the last 10 years, CryoSat has not only delivered a wealth of information about Earth’s changing ice, but has also surpassed expectations with a range of results that go far beyond its original goals. While the conference focuses the latest scientific results from the mission, it is also a celebration of the remarkable contribution that CryoSat has made to our understanding of the cryosphere and its role in the Earth system and the climate, and, in turn, the impacts on society.

Objectives of the Conference: as well as providing critical information about ice, CryoSat has also demonstrated that it can offer a valuable source of data for oceanography, hydrology and geodesy.

The conference therefore provides a forum for international scientists and operational users to present and share state-of-the-art CryoSat-based results, its decadal contribution to science and future perspectives in the following areas:

• Sea ice
• Greenland and Antarctica icesheets
• Glaciers and ice caps
• Oceans and marine gravity
• Hydrology
• Icebergs & ice shelves
• 10 Years of operations, synergies and future missions

Due to the ongoing Pandemic an in-person conference as planned for Santiago (Chile) is impossible this year but in order to keep our AR community vibrant and united we decided to conduct a virtual Symposium in the original dates (October 2020). The structure of the event will be decided once we see the number of abstracts but we anticipate a 3-4 day event with half day sessions including invited talks, regular presentations, poster sessions and working groups. We hope that an in-person 3IARC will be held in Santiago in 2021.

Depending on abstracts received, we will consider the following types of activities: keynote talks; oral sessions; poster sessions; panel discussions; breakout group discussions; and others. Information will be forthcoming on meeting format; this will likely be 3-4 days for 3-4 hours each day.

There will be no cost for registration for this virtual event.

IARC Specific Objectives:

• Create and sustain a growing community
• Advance the state of the science
• Connect different disciplines and stakeholders
• Link scientists to practitioners, users and decision makers
• Cement worldwide, cross-disciplinary collaboration
• Train the next generation of scientists

The Polar Institute and the Arctic Domain Awareness Center are pleased to announce the creation of a new series of programs entitled Arctic Security Dialogues. The Dialogues will address a broad spectrum of security issues to include, but not limited to national security, homeland security, and the many components of civil security. United States Air Force Arctic Strategy: Perspectives and Insights is the first program in the Arctic Security Dialogues series.

On July 21, 2020 Secretary of the Air Force Barbara Barrett released the Department of the Air Force Arctic Strategy noting the “Arctic is among the most strategically significant regions of the world today.” According to the Department of the Air Force, “The strategy outlines the Department’s unique regional role and efforts to optimize Air and Space capabilities throughout the region in support of the National Defense Strategy.” The Air Force Arctic Strategy outlines four lines of effort to include:

• Vigilance in all domains
• Projecting power through a combat-credible force
• Cooperation with allies and partners
• Preparation for Arctic operations

With significant defense assets located at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson (Anchorage), Eielson Air Force Base and Fort Wainwright (Fairbanks/North Pole), Fort Greely (Delta Junction), as well as complementary capabilities in Canada and Greenland, then Air Force Chief of Staff General David L. Goldfein said the Air Force’s Arctic Strategy demonstrates an “unwavering vigilance to protecting the homeland” and “represents a strategic benefit that extends well beyond the region itself.”

We are pleased to host a group of distinguished military leaders for a facilitated round table discussion regarding the Air Force Arctic Strategy to include contextual perspectives about the new Arctic, the Arctic in context of Great Power Competition, and the role and importance of the Air Force in Alaska and the Arctic.

In an effort to ensure the health and safety of our community, we want to let you all know that the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS) Workshop will not be an in-person meeting this fall. Instead, we are planning to have community-oriented discussions on 6-7 October 2020 focused on addressing racial diversity and inclusion and supporting early-career researchers (ECRs) in the WAIS community.

One of the defining aspects of WAIS Workshops is the encouragement of interdisciplinary scientific exchanges across career levels, and we want to make sure that there are still forums for such fruitful, engaging discourse among our West Antarctic research community in spite of COVID-19. To retain a semblance of that unique environment, the WAIS Workshop Organizers are planning to facilitate a series of distributed science sessions for interested community members that will begin before October. These sessions will meet virtually every few weeks as small groups (<15 people) for a series of short research talks (5-10 minutes) followed by WAIS-style discussion. The groups will be shuffled between sessions to promote diverse viewpoints on our scientific questions.

These WAIS activities that are in lieu of an in-person workshop will be at no cost to participants. We plan to provide details on the activities by the end of July.

In the meantime, however, please reach out to your ECR mentee/mentor that you were paired with at the 2019 WAIS Workshop. If you are new to the WAIS community and/or would like to now participate as an ECR mentee (defined here as undergraduate to ≤10 years from PhD) or as a non-ECR mentor, please contact Lauren Simkins (lsimkins at virginia.edu)

Arctic Frontiers 2021 goes digital!

The COVID-19 crisis continues to change the world, including the Arctic. What the effects will be remains unclear. In these uncertain times, one thing we know for sure is that Arctic Frontiers 2021 will be different. While we believe now more than ever in the importance of bringing people together, we have decided to move the content of Arctic Frontiers 2021 online to ensure that no one will lose out on the Arctic Frontiers experience. So the Arctic family will meet from February 1-4 2021 in a slightly different way than what we are used to.

Arctic Frontiers Science conference is traditionally international and multidisciplinary, bringing together social sciences, humanities, physical and life sciences. The Arctic Frontiers Science is focusing on both fundamental and solution-oriented research with strong impact, which addresses growing societal challenges and needs in the Arctic region. Arctic Frontiers Science is developed with the guidance of the Strategic Science Committee of Arctic Frontiers.

It is a special time now and we send warm thoughts to all our friends around the world. We are optimistic and hope that in the first week of February 2021 we can once again gather in Tromsø for good discussions for a sustainable development in the Arctic. Arctic Frontiers secretariat will closely monitor the situation with Covid-19 and develop an optimal technical solution and format for the conference. As of now, it will likely combine elements of a traditional in-person and digital conferences, with a possibility to participate online. Please stay tuned for more updates.

We will organise six science sessions originally proposed by Arctic Frontiers partner institutions:

• Session 1. Arctic health and social inequalities in health
• Session 2. Who gets to tell the Arctic stories
• Session 3. Valuing the digital ocean
• Session 4. Small and medium sized enterprises’ (SME) strategies for social sustainability in the High-North
• Session 5. The coupled Arctic system: Improved understanding from recent international campaigns
• Session 6. Advanced prediction capabilities for the Arctic and beyond

Important dates:

• 6 October 2020: Abstract submission deadline
• 25 September 2020: Abstract acceptance notification
• 5 October 2020: Tentative program is available online

Unfortunately, due to the recent developments in the COVID pandemic in Latin America and especially in Chile, the 2020 local committee in consultation with the National committee has decided to postpone the 3rd Annual Chilean Cryosphere Society Meeting (SOCHICRI) to March 2021. The specific dates will be communicated soon. Considering the uncertainty regarding the spread of the virus, a new date in March of the following year will allow us to develop a hybrid meeting, with in-person and interactive online attendance. The in-person version of the meeting will still be held in the Vicerrectoría de Investigación, Universidad de Concepción. We are now contacting the authors who have already submitted abstracts and paid the fees in order to allow them to withdraw and arrange refunds, if they require to. Nevertheless, the submission platform will be activated this week, remaining open for more submissions until November 30th, 2020 in order to allow interested researchers who would like to participate in the next year event.

So, the SOCHICRI team would like to reiterate the previous invitation to all researchers, professionals and students from Chile and abroad to participate in the annual meeting, organized by the Geography and Geophysics Departments of Concepcion University in Chile.

We invite you to send your abstract through the following online form. Your contribution can focus on any part of the cryosphere subjects, and can include field- or theory-based studies, remote sensing, simulations, legal frameworks, impact and/or risk analyses, water resource assessments and others. Please follow the instructions on the online form to register for the conference and to mention your preferred presentation format (oral or poster).

The closing date for abstracts is November 30, 2020.

The Chilean Cryosphere Society (SOCHICRI) is a non-profit scientific association that brings together national and international scientists and professionals who work on issues related to the cryosphere, the glacial and periglacial environment.

SOCHICRI brings together specialists from different disciplines from both the academic and private worlds who work in the study of the national, South American and Antarctic cryosphere.

SOCHICRI's objective is to maintain communication bridges between professionals and academics in the study of cryospheres; promote new studies; increase the dissemination of new knowledge and support civil society in understanding the national cryosphere.

Although the physical meeting of the International Glaciological Society British Branch is cancelled, there will be a virtual meeting organised by the IGS British Branch and the IGS EGG from 7–9 October 2020.

We are planning 3 half days. There will be both oral and poster sessions. Abstracts are due by 17 August.

Abstract submission is now open for the 2020 virtual IGSBB meeting. Please follow the link above.

Registration will be through the IGS portal and will be announced very shortly. Registration is free but you must register.

Contacts:
BINGHAM Robert <r.bingham at ed.ac.uk>
Rebecca Schlegel <mog.schlegel at gmail.com>
Secretary General, International Glaciological Society (IGS)

The University of Edinburgh is no longer able to host the planned consecutive meetings of the IGS British Branch and UK Antarctic Science Conference this coming September.

We are now working with the IGS Early-Career Glaciology Group (EGG) and colleagues in the National Committee for Antarctic Research (NCAR) on some online alternatives to both meetings for later in the year. The details are to be confirmed and will come to this distribution list in due course, but they will now be separate meetings, and not tied to the previously circulated dates in early September.

Looking to 2021 and 2022, I'm pleased to notify you that the IGSBB committee have agreed that the University of Liverpool will host a September 2021 IGS British Branch (exact dates tbc), and that we at Edinburgh are now working on remounting a combined IGS British Branch / UK Antarctic Science Conference for 29 August - 2 September 2022.

Explore how we can learn from past human-environment relationships through the archeology of migration to inform climate policy today.

From the hunter-gatherer populations who traversed across Siberia and into Beringia during the Late Pleistocene period to the 21st century Sami reindeer herders across Sápmi in Northern Europe, the Arctic has been on the move for millennia. And yet, the accelerated pace of ecological, societal, and climate changes today are introducing a new normal for the Arctic with changing migrations, cultural heritage at risk, and urgency for climate policy.

This webinar will provide an overview of current connections between cultural heritage and climate change science and policy. Presented by Marcy Rockman, PhD, you will learn where there are gaps between climate change and cultural heritage, and where there exists great opportunity. Together, we'll explore how we learn (or not) from the past and how we learn (or not) our environments. The archaeology of migration and human encounters with new or unfamiliar environments are essential parts of this area.

Marcy Rockman PhD is an archaeologist-geologist by training. From 2011-2018 she served with the U.S. National Park Service as Climate Change Adaptation Coordinator for Cultural Resources. She now works with the International Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS) on projects to better integrate cultural heritage into international climate response, such as reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and with the nonprofit organization Co-Equal to help provide climate research to the U.S. Congress.

Migration In Harmony is an international, cross-disciplinary network of Arctic migration researchers funded by the National Science Foundation. Learn more and sign up here.

International Glaciological Society Global Seminar #23:

Fiamma Straneo, Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California San Diego: "Ahoy Captain Is That a Glacier up Ahead? Lessons Learned From Working at Greenland's Marine Margins".

Please register in advance for the seminars. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the seminar.

The seminar will also be available afterwards on the Friends of the International Glaciological Society Facebook page so that you can watch it there if technology fails or you can't make it.

The second Arctic Resilience Forum will be held online as a series of ten weekly webinars launching on October 7, 2020. Each session touches on a specific aspect of Arctic resilience, ranging from food security and Indigenous youth leadership, to gender, energy and connectivity. The forum seeks to actively engage participants in conversations about how to build resilience of Arctic communities and ecosystems. It offers the opportunity to discuss concrete best practices and experiences from the Council and the broader community of circumpolar experts and knowledge holders. The Arctic Resilience Forum aims to continue to strengthen cooperation on resilience work.

The Arctic Resilience Forum will be convened every Wednesday from 11:30am – 1:00pm (EST) over a series of ten weeks, beginning October 7, 2020. The online series seeks to engage a broad audience in conversations about how to build the resilience of Arctic communities and ecosystems across a variety of focus areas, including:

• October 7: Indigenous Youth Leadership
• October 14: Food Security
• October 21: Renewable Energy
• October 28: Human Health and Pandemics
• November 11: Broadband Connectivity
• November 18: Gender
• November 25: Socio-Ecological Resilience
• December 9: Infrastructure
• December 16: Respecting Traditional Indigenous Knowledge Systems

Follow the link above to learn more, register, and to get updates for the whole Arctic Resilience Forum series. Individual session pages will open up with registration for specific events approximately one week in advance. Russian language translation will be available for all session.

The Byrd Center's 2020 Climate Symposium will kick off with a keynote lecture by speaker Richard Alley, Falling dominoes? Ice, climate, sea level and our future, virtually via Zoom.

Sea level is rising because of human-caused warming, impacting coastal communities. Shrinkage of the ice sheets of Antarctica and Greenland is contributing, and could accelerate in the future. History and physics show that warming melts ice, and that too much warming triggers rapid iceberg calving. Visitors to Glacier Bay in Alaska now sail more than 60 miles into a fjord that held ice up to a mile thick when George Vancouver visited in 1794, and many other fjords have rapidly “unzipped” into their mountains or ice sheet. If a similar retreat is triggered in any of the major Antarctic basins holding far more ice, more than 10 feet of additional sea-level rise could occur in the following century or less. Exciting scientific advances will be needed to reduce the remaining large uncertainties.

For detailed information about the Byrd Center Symposium on Climate Change, visit https://byrd.osu.edu/symposium/2020/climate-change-research-at-osu

Throughout October, IARPC Collaborations will be holding a "MOSAiC Month" focused on the Multidisciplinary drifting Observatory for the Study of Arctic Climate (MOSAiC) expedition. Led by the Alfred Wegener Institute, MOSAiC is the first year-round expedition into the central Arctic exploring the Arctic climate system. The backbone of MOSAiC is the year-round operation of R/V Polarstern, which has been drifting with the sea ice across the central Arctic with researchers setting up a distributed regional network of observational sites.

This webinar serves as an introduction and overview of the MOSAiC expedition. All are welcome to attend. Please follow the link above to register.

Due to COVID-19, it has been decided to postpone #ArcticCircle2020. The 2021 Assembly is scheduled for October 14-17.

The annual Arctic Circle Assembly is the largest annual international gathering on the Arctic, attended by more than 2000 participants from 60 countries. It is attended by heads of states and governments, ministers, members of parliaments, officials, experts, scientists, entrepreneurs, business leaders, indigenous representatives, environmentalists, students, activists and others from the growing international community of partners and participants interested in the future of the Arctic.

Please follow the link above for the most up-to-date information.

The Byrd Center's 2020 Climate Symposium was developed with input from last year’s participants, the intent of this year’s symposium is to foster interdisciplinary collaboration on climate change research at OSU.

Discussion and planning are facilitated through the use of Breakout Groups in two sessions. Each session will start with short preview talks on each of the proposed discussion topics, followed by 1 hour of group discussions, run concurrently, with a designated leader and rapporteur. Each session will end with a plenary discussion of next steps.

Registration is required.

For detailed information about the Byrd Center Symposium on Climate Change, please visit the link above.

YOUMARES 11 and Covid-19:

This year, YOUMARES embraces technology with a hybrid conference. A small physical event will be complimented by an online interactive streaming of the sessions. We ensure all our participants that the physical conference will take place with compliance to health and safety regulations.

In a world facing numerous environmental emergencies, the challenges for scientists and engineers to define problems and find solutions are becoming increasingly urgent. We believe in the power of shared knowledge and want to JOIN FORCES from the marine realm at this year’s YOUMARES 11 conference. No matter if you are a marine scientist, marine engineer, innovator in the marine field, belonging to an NGO, a social scientist or an expert in marine governance and policy WE INVITE YOU to create an interdisciplinary hotspot with us.

YOUMARES, decoded as – YOUng MARine RESearchers – is an international marine conference for early career researchers initiated by the working group on “Studies and Education” of the German Society for Marine Research (Deutsche Gesellschaft für Meeresforschung – DGM) in 2009.

This year’s YOUMARES will be co-hosted by the GEOMAR – Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research Kiel, taking place at the GEOMAR Campus “Seefischmarkt” in Kiel.

In 2020 YOUMARES wants to create a platform for intra- and transdisciplinary exchange as we believe in the power of shared skills and knowledge under the headline – JOINING FORCES – Science, Tech and People.

We are calling for advanced students, early career scientists, and young innovators to host a session at YOUMARES 11. As a group or as a single person you have the unique opportunity to give your science or expertise a platform. You define your session, invite your speakers, design your program, and finally chair your session.

See the link above for more information.

We invite you to join us virtually to share results, discuss new ideas, and to build collaborations with fellow glaciologists from the northwest and around the world.

As always, the meeting will be informal with an emphasis on highlighting the work of students and early career scientists. We strongly encourage presentations about the new, the controversial, and the possibly-hairbrained.

The website (linked above) will be updated regularly with new information. As is tradition, there is no formal registration. However, to roughly gauge the expected number of attendees, to figure out session themes, and to provide participants with the Zoom password, we would appreciate if you would fill out the registration form.

Please direct any questions to northwestglaciologists2020 [at] gmail.com

International Glaciological Society Global Seminar #24:

Speaking: Ellyn Enderlin, Boise State University: "Exploring Controls on Glacier Dynamics: What Remotely-Sensed Iceberg Calving, Submarine Melting, and Frontal Ablation Datasets Tell Us About Ocean Forcing".

Please register in advance for the seminars. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the seminar.

The seminar will also be available afterwards on the Friends of the International Glaciological Society Facebook page so that you can watch it there if technology fails or you can't make it.

The second Arctic Resilience Forum will be held online as a series of ten weekly webinars launching on October 7, 2020. Each session touches on a specific aspect of Arctic resilience, ranging from food security and Indigenous youth leadership, to gender, energy and connectivity. The forum seeks to actively engage participants in conversations about how to build resilience of Arctic communities and ecosystems. It offers the opportunity to discuss concrete best practices and experiences from the Council and the broader community of circumpolar experts and knowledge holders. The Arctic Resilience Forum aims to continue to strengthen cooperation on resilience work.

The Arctic Resilience Forum will be convened every Wednesday from 11:30am – 1:00pm (EST) over a series of ten weeks, beginning October 7, 2020. The online series seeks to engage a broad audience in conversations about how to build the resilience of Arctic communities and ecosystems across a variety of focus areas, including:

• October 7: Indigenous Youth Leadership
• October 14: Food Security
• October 21: Renewable Energy
• October 28: Human Health and Pandemics
• November 11: Broadband Connectivity
• November 18: Gender
• November 25: Socio-Ecological Resilience
• December 9: Infrastructure
• December 16: Respecting Traditional Indigenous Knowledge Systems

Follow the link above to learn more, register, and to get updates for the whole Arctic Resilience Forum series. Individual session pages will open up with registration for specific events approximately one week in advance. Russian language translation will be available for all session.