Past Events

Ilisimatusarfik, the US National Science Foundation, and the US Consulate in Nuuk invite you to a presentation about the National Science Foundation and Greenland.

Have you ever wondered about the groundbreaking research that shapes our future?   Are you curious about the critical role of the National Science Foundation in advancing science, and the work they fund in Greenland?  Then please join us for a presentation about the National Science Foundation (NSF) and Greenland. Learn about the NSF generally and its work with and in Greenland including the Joint Science Education Project (JSEP), a field-based science program for students from Greenland, the U.S., and Denmark. The presentation will be offered in English with translation to Greenlandic. Light refreshments will be offered.

When: Tuesday, 7 November, 14.00 - 16.00
Where: University of Greenland – Ilisimatusarfik - Canteen at Campus Ilimmarfik
Who: Students of all ages are invited, as well as the general public. Representatives of the National Science Foundation will attend, as well as members of the U.S.-based and international research community.

The next IGS Nordic branch meeting is co-arranged by Aalto University and CSC – IT Center for Science Ltd. and held in person on at Aalto University in Ottaniemi, Espoo, Finland.

The Nordic Branch of the IGS meeting provides an opportunity for Nordic-based scientists and students in glaciology to present their latest results and projects.

The deadline for submitting abstracts is 31 October 2023.

UNE North hosts the fall meeting of 42˚N: The North Atlantic Network, formerly known as New England Arctic Network (NEAN). Please register for the meeting. In person and remote options are available.

Meeting Objectives

• Reconvene and nurture the 42˚N: The North Atlantic Network
• Continue to provide a forum for community-based research
• Engage students, including the UMaine & UNH NSF Research Traineeships (SAUNA & CARPE)
• Discuss and develop ideas for a community-based research proposal

42˚N: The North Atlantic Network combines the wealth of academic expertise in Arctic research across New England with researchers, stakeholders, and external partners concerned with environmental, economic, and social impacts. The network provides an ideal community for anticipating and responding to change in the Arctic and its impacts on the eastern coast of North America.

A number of meandering rivers in the Arctic, especially in Siberia, have point bars with strikingly structured permafrost polygon patterns. These seem to mimic not just the scroll ‘bar’ lines that are often visible in permafrost-free point bars, but the radial growth lines as well that tend to be perpendicular to the scrolls and have not been observed before. We use a Unet-type convolutional neural network to map the polygons. The network is trained with image tiles derived from manually mapped scroll- and radial lines on nine point bars. Post-processing of the semantic segmentation results allows the identification of individual polygons; a Python ‘networkx’ graph is used to study the relations between the polygons. A simple model of meandering suggests a preliminary explanation of how these beautiful patterns might form.

The Permfrost Discovery Gateway is a NSF and Google.org funded intelligent data management platform created for big data creation and discovery to support knowledge-generation in the Arctic permafrost region. The project is aimed to enable knowledge-generation and community-preparedness by creating big geospatial data products of permafrost thaw features from remote sensing imagery, developing AI tools to identify and track information within the big geospatial data, and building user-friendly online tools to enable scientific discovery, policy, and to empower Arctic communities facing permafrost thaw.

This session will include briefings from federal agencies on their polar activities and updates from US delegates to the International Arctic Science Committee and the Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research.

CATCH Seminar Series

This is a monthly online seminar series which hosts talks on CATCH related topics with the aim of fostering engaging scientific discussions between researchers on outstanding questions for our communities. This is open to researchers at all stages of their careers and we hope this seminar series provides researchers with the opportunity to interact and encourage potential future collaborations.

Format
Presentation from guest speaker(s) (30 minutes)
Q&A and open discussion (30 minutes)

Abstract: Foundation models are artificial intelligence (AI) models that are pre-trained on large unlabeled datasets through self-supervision and then fine-tuned for different downstream tasks. There is increasing interest in the scientific community to investigate whether this approach can be successfully applied to domains beyond natural language processing and computer vision to effectively build generalist AI models that make use of different types of data. Here, IBM and NASA present the first end-to-end framework for pre-training and fine-tuning foundation models efficiently from a large source of geospatial data. We have implemented and applied this framework to produce Prithvi, a geospatial foundation model pre-trained on multispectral satellite imagery from the NASA Harmonized Landsat-Sentinel 2 (HLS) dataset. The framework supports automated statistical smart sampling strategies based on whether, land cover and other datasets to maximize impact and minimize waste of resources (e.g., avoiding areas and time ranges that would not bring any new information). Prithvi is a Temporal Vision Transformer that includes positional and temporal embeddings, which was trained on IBM Cloud Vela cluster (NVIDIA A100 GPUs) using a Masked Auto Encoder approach and Mean Squared Error loss function for a total of 10k GPUs hours. We demonstrated using the fine-tuning workflows built in our framework that Prithvi could be successfully fine-tuned to produce state-of-the-art AI models for Earth observation tasks: flood mapping, burn scar identification and multi-temporal crop classification. We carefully studied the impact of Prithvi's pre-trained weights on the downstream tasks by comparing learning curves for: (1) fine-tuning the whole model, (2) fine-tuning only the downstream task decoder, (3) training the model without taking advantage of Prithvi's pre-trained weights. Furthermore, given the scarcity of labeled data for Earth observation tasks, we progressively decreased the amount of labeled data available for fine-tuning the model to assess data efficiency. This analysis showed that using Prithvi we could achieve peak performance on test data quicker and with less training data (i.e. up to 50% less). Finally, in order to increase the impact of this work, the pre-trained model and fine-tuning workflows have been made publicly available through Hugging Face (https://huggingface.co/ibm-nasa-geospatial).

Cyber2A is a newly funded NSF effort aiming to provide cybertraining to geoscientists, in particular Arctic scientists, in modern artificial intelligence (AI) techniques. The effort’s long-term goal is to establish a sustainable and scalable learning community. This will be accomplished through customized training in cutting-edge AI for both current and next-generation geoscientists who are interested in applying AI to solve scientific problems.

The European Union-funded Arctic Black Carbon impacting Climate and Air Pollution (ABC-iCAP) project is organizing a 3rd online research collaboration with European and North American fire, smoke, and climate experts. This 90-minute webinar will take place 13 November 2023 at 10:00 a.m. Eastern Time/6:00 a.m. Alaska Time (15:00 UTC).

The organizers’ aim is for the projects and people to learn about ongoing work and describe current and near-term future trends of boreal and Arctic fire and smoke.

The webinar will be recorded and shared with participants, as well as posted online.

The Rovaniemi Arctic Spirit conference 2023 continues the successful forum initiated in 2013. The first conferences went under the name “In the Spirit of the Rovaniemi Process” to honor the visions that in the late 80’s and early 90’s started the official Arctic cooperation between Arctic states. The current name "Rovaniemi Arctic Spirit" underlines that these conferences are not looking to the past but they are building for the future while remembering the original Arctic spirit of Rovaniemi. The biannual Rovaniemi Arctic Spirit conference series gathers policymakers, representatives of academia and other stakeholders for Arctic discussions in Rovaniemi, the birthplace of official Arctic cooperation.

The Rovaniemi Arctic Spirit conference, initiated by the city of Rovaniemi and the University of Lapland, reminds that Rovaniemi has a strong tradition in hosting major Arctic initiatives and events. The strength of Rovaniemi lies in the geographical location of the city at the Arctic Circle coupled with a well-functioning academic Arctic infrastructure. During the years, the Rovaniemi Arctic Spirit conferences series has developed into Finland’s foremost Arctic event. The ambition has been to grow in quality and relevance, not in size, in order to offer meaningful Arctic discussions and meetings and thus spread the real Arctic Spirit of Rovaniemi.

The 14th Symposium on Polar Science will be hosted by the National Institute of Polar Research (NIPR). The NIPR is organizing this annual symposium to present and promote a wide variety of polar scientific research and interdisciplinary studies.

The symposium will be conducted in-person, meaning participants are expected to attend at the physical venue. However, some sessions may be hosted in a hybrid format, combining in-person and virtual participation. Please stay tuned for future announcements regarding this possibility. Please note that the official language of the symposium will be English.

Extended deadline for abstract submission: 15 September 2023.

The 11th Annual World Congress of Ocean-2023 (WCO-2023) will be held in Sapporo, Hokkaido, Japan. WCO series congress contribute to offering professionals in the field of ocean a multidisciplinary informative cooperative platform, and it has been the most definite and grand Ocean event in Asia. The conference offers the business leaders, academic researchers, and government agents around the world to meet and exchange ideas in research technologies and application experiences face to face, finding gaps in the technology development and build future collaboration. The 3-day conference is an effective series of activities including Plenary Forum, Parallel Sessions, Welcome Banquet, Exhibitions, Posters and Tours etc.

Programmed Chapters at a Glance:

• Opening Ceremony and Keynote Forum
• Track 1: Ocean Economy and Finance
• Track 2: Maritime Law
• Track 3: Coastal and Ocean Engineering
• Track 4: Ocean Energy Development and Utilization
• Track 5: Emerging Ocean Science and Technology
• Track 6: Marine Management and Environment Protection
• Track 7: Smart Port, Green Shipping & Shipbuilding
• Track 8: Marine Biotechnology
• Track 9: Aquaculture and Fisheries

Important Deadlines

• Deadline for online Early Bird Registration: 28 February 2023
• Deadline for Abstract Submission: 15 October 2023
• Deadline for Regular Registration: 10 November 2023

Content of Webinar: Drilling and sampling of permafrost; differences between subsurface exploration in permafrost regions and temperate regions; importance and basics of in-situ permafrost temperature measurements; visual classification of frozen soils (ASTM D4083); in-situ geophysical testing using multichannel analysis of surface waves (MASW), electrical resistivity tomography (ERT), and distributed acoustic and temperature sensing (DAS, DTS); laboratory testing of frozen soils.

Brief Introduction of Instructor: Dr. Ming Xiao is a Professor of Civil Engineering (with specialty in geotechnical engineering) in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Penn State. His current research focuses on permafrost degradation, permafrost coastal erosion, and their impacts on civil infrastructure and local communities in the Arctic. He is the President-Elect of the USPA and the Chair of USPA’s Permafrost Engineering Education Program (PEEP). He is a registered Professional Engineer (PE) in the States of California (since 2007) and Ohio (since 2005).

Format: The webinar is offered on Zoom. The webinar is 1 hour long, including a 50-min lecture and 10-min Q&A. Certificate of Professional Development Hours (PDH) will be provided to participants who request it after each webinar. The webinars are free for USPA members. The webinars will be moderated. The seminars will be recorded and uploaded on the USPA website. Future participants can register and watch the webinar individually and receive PDH. Registration fee for non-USPA members to watch the recorded webinar is the same as in the live webinars.

This session will cover an overview of the Arctic Council and Gwich'in Council International (GCI), highlighting initiatives related to governance, climate change, and promoting Indigenous Knowledge on a global level. The speaker will discuss how decision making on the local level has an impact on the international level, and vice versa. They will also provide a deeper dive on the significance of increased wildfire in the boreal forest on global climate change and how the Arctic Council's permanent participants are meeting this challenge.

Land Back is a movement to reclaim Indigenous jurisdiction, offering ‘a new way to communicate old demands.’ Fish Back shares the same concerns—seeking to address theft of Indigenous fisheries, harms that have followed from colonization, and the need for restoration across ecological, economic, political, cultural, and spiritual spheres. This talk offers an invitation to envision what we can re-establish and reclaim through a re-constitution of Indigenous law and governance over fisheries. Together, we will discuss what roles knowledge co-production, environmental assessment and policy, community-based management and governance, and co-management regimes may (or may not) play on the path towards realizing more just futures for fish, fisheries, and fishing peoples.

Speaker will be in Fairbanks, Fairbanks Troth Yeddha' Campus O'Neill Bldg., Room 201
Lena Point Fisheries Facility, Room 101
Anchorage 1007 W. 3rd Ave, Suite 100

Zoom
Please register in advance.
After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting.

Funded by the National Science Foundation’s Research Traineeship (NSF-NRT) and Navigating the New Arctic (NNA) programs, the Tamamta Program centers on bridging Indigenous and Western sciences to transform graduate education and research in fisheries and marine sciences. Stay tuned for more updates about all of the Tamamta Fellows and their incredible work and research interests across Alaska.

Join the Alaska Center for Climate Assessment and Policy (ACCAP) for this month's NWS Alaska Climate Outlook Briefing. Rick Thoman will will review recent and current climate conditions around Alaska, discuss some forecasting tools, and finish up with the Climate Prediction Center’s forecast for December 2023 and the winter season. Join the gathering online to learn what’s happened and what may be in store with Alaska’s seasonal climate.

Register on the ACCAP website for the online event being held on Friday, 17 November at 12:00 p.m. AKT.

In 2023, Canada experienced the worst wildfire season on record, including record high area burned, numerous community evacuations in the Northwest Territories and beyond, and poor air quality from smoke in both Canada and the Eastern seaboard. Farther west in Alaska, 2023 saw a near complete absence of wildfire until late July, only to be followed by a late season surge. This presentation will review and contrast the Alaskan and Canadian fire seasons and discuss what lessons we can learn from the tale of two extremes.

Register on our website to join the virtual event on November 21st at 11am AKST.

The Government of Iceland (Ministry for Foreign Affairs, Ministry of the Environment, Energy and Climate, Ministry of Food, Agriculture and Fisheries), with financial support from the The Nordic Council of Ministers and The Nordic Council, will host the Second International Symposium on Plastics in the Arctic and Sub-Arctic Region at Harpa Concert Hall and Conference Centre, in partnership with Pinngortitaleriffik, Grønlands Naturinstitut, Senter for hav og Arktis, International Council for the Exploration of the Sea (ICES), OSPAR Commission, GRID-Arendal, UArctic, UNESCO Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission, Wilson Center, United Nations Environment Programme, IASC.

The conference will build on the first symposium held in March 2021 and invites contributions on new scientific and local knowledge as well as policy-related initiatives in the field of plastic pollution to discuss ways and means to reduce the impact of plastics on Arctic ecosystems. The symposium will include platform presentations, posters and panel discussions. The Scientific Steering Committee for the symposium suggests the following themes:

1. Monitoring and assessment of plastic pollution in the Arctic.
2. Methodological developments to determine macro, micro and nano plastics.
3. Sources and transport of plastic in the Arctic and sub-Arctic.
4. Impacts of marine litter in the Arctic (environmental, economic and social).
5. Arctic challenges and solutions for improved waste management.
6. Tackling plastic pollution: international collaboration, policies, best practices and novel developments from around the world.

Important Dates

• Extended deadline for abstracts is 1 June 2023.
• Early bird registration extended to 30 September 2023.

The IASC Network on Arctic Glaciology meeting and Workshop on the dynamics and mass budget of Arctic glaciers will be held in Obergurgl, Austria, on 22-24 January 2024.

This in-person meeting will be held at the University Center, which also offers accommodation during and around the meeting. The meeting will start on Monday January 22 (around 9:00) and finish around noon on Wednesday January 24. The recommended arrival date is Sunday January 21. Rooms in the University Centre are available from January 21-25. There is no registration fee for the meeting.

Organizers welcome contributions on all aspects concerning the mass balance and dynamics of Arctic glaciers, including the Greenland Ice Sheet, and that utilize a broad range of methods, including field observations, remote sensing and modelling. In addition to this, the meeting will include a special cross-cutting activity on “Societal impacts of glacier and snow cover changes in a warming Arctic”, which aims to provide an inter-disciplinary forum that brings together atmospheric scientists, snow experts, glaciologists and social scientists.

Please register for the meeting and submit your abstract by the deadline of 24 November 2023.

The Arctic Futures Symposium is an annual conference that brings together Arctic stakeholders in Europe's capital to discuss issues of importance to them.

The International Polar Foundation and its many Arctic stakeholder partners invite participation in the 14th edition of the Arctic Futures Symposium on November 28th and 29th in Brussels, Belgium. The Symposium will take place at the Town Hall Europe, located at Square de Meeûs 5-6, 1000 Brussels, Belgium.

This year's Symposium will focus on:
Managing the Challenges of a Changing Arctic
Avenues for Arctic Cooperation
A Safe and Secure Arctic
Arctic Youth : Meeting Challenges and Creating Opportunities
Cultivating Arctic Communities
Implementing the Green Transition in the Arctic

ACI’s 17th Arctic Shipping Summit will be taking place on the 29th–30th November 2023 in Montreal, Canada. The two-day event will consist of a number of informative presentations followed by interactive Q&A sessions and panel discussions, bringing together key industry stakeholders including ship-owners, ship-managers, & associated solution providers, coastguards and governmental transport authorities, meteorologists, consultants & technology providers.