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Learn lessons from planned relocations around the world from environmental displacement and how they relate to Arctic migrations.

Climate change and the extreme weather events it intensifies, are today and will continue to be the largest catalyst for migration worldwide. The Internal Displacement Monitoring Center estimates that the number of new displacements associated with weather events will reach 22 million for 2019, making it the worst years for weather-related disaster displacement since records began.

Join the Migration in Harmony Reserach Coordnation Network for this webinar to learn what support is, and is not available, to communities are relocating away from environmental hazards. Migraiton experts Dr. Elizabeth Ferris, Sanjula Weerasinghe, and Erica Bower will share their experiences working with the International Organizaiton for Migration, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, and the World Bank to create international guidance and toolkits for planned community relocations, and discuss lessons learned for future relocations in a climate changed world.

Dr. Elizabeth Ferris is an ISIM Research Professor at Georgetown and a non-resident senior fellow in Foreign Policy at the Brookings Institution. Her current research interests focus on the politics of humanitarian action and on the role of civil society in protecting displaced populations. She previously served as Senior Advisor to the UN General Assembly’s Summit for Refugees and Migrants and spent 20 years working in the field of humanitarian assistance. Sanjula Weerasinghe is a non-resident Fellow at ISIM and a consultant with UNHCR. Her recent experience includes work with the Migrants in Countries in Crisis Initiative Secretariat, where she was the lead secretariat drafter of the Initiative Guidelines to Protect Migrants in Countries Experiencing Conflict or Natural Disaster. Erica Bower is a PhD candidate at Stanford University, where she focuses on how people make decisions on the move in climate change contexts, and understanding the conditions under which voluntary migration can be a strategy for climate change adaptation.Previously, she was a Climate Displacement Policy specialist at the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.

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.

Update from the organizers: We are sorry to announce that the 3rd International Conference on Polar Climate and Environmental Change in the Last Millennium that was planned for 24-26 September 2020 has been rescheduled for 23-25 November 2020. Furthermore, Important dates were also postponed. Our decision was made in response to concerns about international and domestic travel expressed by many of you, as well as the need to protect attendees in high-risk categories. Our decision was also guided by Nicolaus Copernicus University COVID-19 policies.

The aim of the conference is to present scientific achievements and to identify gaps in the field of the historical climatology of the polar regions based on early meteorological observations, history, dendroclimatology, paleolimnology, geophysics, geomorphology, and other sources.

The conference is supported by the Polish Geophysical Society, the Committee on Polar Research of the Polish Academy of Sciences, and the Polish Polar Consortium.

Registration will open on 15 November 2019.

The College of Fisheries and Ocean Sciences will hold its fourth weekly seminar via Zoom. The talk will be offered by Jessica Black (Gwich’in), an assistant professor in UAF’s College of Rural and Community Development, and Courtney Carothers, a professor in UAF’s College of Fisheries and Ocean Sciences.

Black and Carothers will present the “Indigenizing Salmon Science and Management” project that gave rise to “Tamamta ‘All of Us’: Transforming Western and Indigenous Fisheries and Marine Sciences Together,” a new National Science Foundation $3 million dollar grant to transform graduate education at CFOS.

For more information and to find the link to the webinar, please follow the link above.

Join us as members of the MOSAiC expedition education and outreach team lead you through the new MOSAiC-related curriculum "Exploring the New and Old Arctic”. The curriculum can easily be adapted to virtual learning as students engage with immersive 360° virtual expeditions, authentic Arctic datasets, and App-based labs.

About MOSAiC

The MOSAiC expedition is one of the largest Arctic research expeditions ever conducted with more than 500 scientists from 19 countries participating. The goal of the expedition is to study all aspects of the changing Arctic climate system by freezing a ship in ice and drifting with the ice for an entire year! Since the start of the expedition in September 2019, MOSAiC scientists have braved sub-zero temperatures, months of total darkness, curious polar bears, and logistical challenges in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic. Despite these obstacles, this unprecedented expedition has persisted and will continue through October 2020.

Bring MOSAiC into your virtual classrooms today!

WHO: K-12 science teachers.
WHAT: Webinar focused on the MOSAiC-related curriculum, "Exploring the New and Old Arctic".
WHY: The MOSAiC expedition will continue through October 2020. Take advantage of the many MOSAiC-related virtual teaching tools and connect your students to the science and adventure of the MOSAiC expedition in real-time!
HOW: Register for the webinar to receive an invitation and Zoom link for the event.

Polar Institute and Sandia National Laboratories welcome your participation in the live webcast.

Research stations and infrastructure in the North American Arctic (Alaska, Canada and Greenland) provide critical science and information about Arctic climate and environment, provide safe bases of operations, and can stimulate international collaboration.

Hosted in partnership with Sandia National Laboratories, this panel aims to survey existing research infrastructure among the North American Arctic nations, explore existing gaps and discuss emerging opportunities for new capabilities or collaboration. Panelists will provide overviews of current research infrastructure in Alaska, Canada and Greenland and plans for addressing emerging needs. Moreover, they will highlight the need for close, international cooperation between North American research institutions.

Note: please submit questions to polar [at] wilsoncenter.org or the Polar Institute's Twitter during the Q&A session.

Please follow the link above to register.

COVID-19 Update: Our annual Arctic Shipping Forum Helsinki and Arctic Shipping North America conferences have moved online, taking place 27 – 30 October 2020. We look forward to bringing together the who's who of the Arctic shipping industry in this new virtual format to learn, connect and move forward together.

Developing technological capabilities. Improving emergency response. Securing a sustainable future for shipping in the Arctic.

Follow the link above for more information.

The National Environmental Satellite Data Information Service (NESDIS) which is part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) operates a number of satellites for monitoring the earth’s environment. These satellites are divided into two types of orbiting strategies.

Geostationary (GEO) satellites orbit at the same speed and direction as the earth’s rotation. Their fixed position relative to the earth provides continuous monitoring of the development and movement of weather systems, however to synchronize with the earth’s rotation their orbit is quite distant from the surface and centered over the equator. This results in degraded resolution and parallax displacement in the high latitudes like Alaska. The newest generation of GEO satellites can take observations as frequently as every 30 seconds.

Polar-orbiting satellites travel from pole to pole covering a new swath of the earth with each pass. They are positioned much lower than geostationary satellites and are often referred as Low Earth Orbiting or LEO satellites. LEO satellites are usually sun-synchronous, covering the entire globe twice a day (once ascending and once descending) and passing over the same point around the same time each day. They have much higher resolution imagery than GEO and minimal parallax, however even with multiple LEO satellites and orbital trajectories converging over northern latitudes, the coverage for Alaska is less frequent than GEO. LEO satellites are often equipped with additional sensors, such as passive microwave which is able to see through clouds.

For Alaska, LEO and GEO satellites have advantages and disadvantages, however other traditional observation networks are sparse in the state, so it is important to utilize the best qualities of each platform to fully diagnose and monitor hazardous natural events. This presentation will show several examples of how data from each of these satellite platforms can be complementary in this process.

Please follow the link above to register.

International Glaciological Society Global Seminar #21:

Eric Rignot, NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, "Where Ice Melt by the Ocean Matters Most".

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 National Academies’ Board on Atmospheric Sciences and Climate is hosting a 2-hour webinar to contribute to an ongoing dialogue on Earth System Predictability Research and Development. The goals of this event are to (1) share the main themes from the June 2020 Earth Systems Predictability workshop with the community, (2) provide any updates to the community on relevant activities, and (3) open a dialogue about how the community might contribute to advancing the initiative.

Please follow the link above for more information and to register.

This seminar will be presented by Matthew Burtner (University of Virginia), Leena Cho (University of Virginia), and Gabrielle Russomagno (School of Visual Arts). During this webinar presenters will discuss how their work spans science and the arts through media such as music, landscape architecture, and the visual arts.

Speaker Abstracts:

Matthew will share how he uses sound as a medium between music and science in Arctic coastal ecosystems. Ecoacoustic music utilizes sonification, field recording and environmental materials to imbed natural systems into music. He will discuss the methodology and show examples of these techniques in his work.

By merging the study of environmental humanities, and science and technology studies with landscape architecture, Leena will highlight the Arctic ground’s vibrant materialities as a conceptual and physical basis for design, while delineating potential areas of landscape design research and collaboration to further examine design potentials unique to the Arctic’s built environment. Permafrost ground is one of the defining landscape elements in the Arctic, and is a foundation for dynamic socioecological and cultural expressions in Arctic cities.

Gabrielle will discuss A Quick and Tragic Thaw, a series of artworks that explores the impact of a warming world using the arctic region as the symbolic apex. Through the study of scholarly research and data, use of mapping technology and satellite imagery, as well as essays, poems, photographs and illustrations, these artworks interpret the more recent story of human influenced climate change. More broadly, this urgent narration recognizes migration movements of biological forms, toxins, and water and is meant to be a meditation on loss and the fragility of the planet.