Witness the Arctic | Volume 23, Number 2 - Fall

Greenland has a globally unique sled dog culture that is more than 4,000 years old. There is concern in Greenland about the decline in the number of dogs recorded in the past decades and how to pass on the cultural skills and knowledge of traditional dog sledging. Educators in the traditional Inuit settlement of Tiilerilaaq created an educational project to build sledges the traditional way. Students participated in all stages of the project including the final phase: an overnight trip mushing dogs on their new sledges.

In 2015 a team of environmental scientists sailed into the Arctic Ocean as part of the international GEOTRACES program and participated in a novel project: "Float Your Boat" a happy marriage of science outreach and investigation, that allowed researchers to simultaneously generate excitement for their work and study the Arctic using unorthodox tools. The project transcended international boundaries with its success relying ultimately upon actions of interested citizens of Iceland.

It's been a busy season for the NSF-funded program, STEM at the Poles! Research Experiences for Formal and Informal Educators in the Polar Regions. The program has supported three educators at the on the McMurdo Field Station in Antarctica and another to work with the IceCube research team. Another educator is on the Multidisciplinary drifting Observatory for the Study of Arctic Climate (MOSAiC) expedition. Their experiences are shared in this article

Recent Sea Ice Prediction Network–Phase 2 (SIPN2) activities are highlighted here, including the 2019 Sea Ice Outlook Reports, a recent webinar on the European-Union-funded project APPLICATE, and plans to convene an open meeting on sea-ice research efforts during the 2019 American Geophysical Union (AGU) Fall Meeting in San Francisco, California.

Future permafrost coastal system dynamics will challenge conventional wisdom as the system enters a new state, impacting human decision-making and adaptation planning, cultural heritage resources, and likely resulting in unforeseen national security challenges. The recently funded Permafrost Coastal Systems Network (PerCS-Net) focuses on leveraging resources from existing national and international networks that have a common vision of better understanding permafrost coastal system dynamics and emerging transdisciplinary science, engineering, and societal issues.

ARCUS Interim Executive Director, Director of Programs, Helen Wiggins, highlights recent news, including the National Science Foundation award of a three-year cooperative agreement for "Building Community in Arctic Research: Communication, Research Support, and Multi-Knowledge System Integration" and updates activities and programs such as Engaging Rural and Alaska Native Youth in Arctic STEM, the SEARCH Arctic Futures 2050 Conference, and ARCUS events planned during the 2019 Fall AGU Meetings.

Recent activities of the Study of Environmental Arctic Change (SEARCH) program are reported here, including the convening of Arctic scientists, Indigenous Peoples, and policymakers at the Arctic Futures 2050 conference to collaboratively envision the information that will be needed to inform Arctic policy in the coming decades. SEARCH also plans several events at the 2019 Fall Meeting of the American Geophysical Union (AGU) in San Francisco, California.

ARCUS board member Kaare Sikuaq Erickson is the North Slope Science Liaison for the Ukpeaġvik Inupiat Corporation in Utqiagvik (formerly Barrow), Alaska. As liaison, he provides advice to Arctic research projects during all phases of their projects and facilitating outreach and engagement initiatives in communities in the Arctic. Kaare sees that both Arctic residents and Arctic researchers are alarmed by the extreme climatic and seasonal changes the Arctic is facing. The value of Arctic research has never been greater as the world needs to know the threats we are currently facing.

ARCUS board member Peter Webley works at the University of Alaska Fairbanks Geophysical Institute, is the Associate Director of Research at the Alaska Center for Unmanned Aircraft Systems Integration, an Associate Research Professor of Remote Sensing, and a Faculty Ambassador to UAF's Office of Intellectual Property and Commercialization. Peter sees that remote sensing data provides an ideal tool to map the Arctic landscape to detect and track natural hazards that can affect local infrastructure and population centers.

For years, the Qayassiq Walrus Commission (QWC) and the Bristol Bay Marine Mammal Council have worked with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the National Marine Fisheries Service in establishing long-term marine mammal corridor boundaries of the shared marine subsistence food resources shared in Togiak Bay by all other Bristol Bay tribes. But, there are still gaps in research and management that need to be addressed.

The FY 2020 solicitation for the National Science Foundation's Big Idea, Navigating the New Arctic (NNA), informed by the FY 2019 competition and other feedback from the research community, has several significant revisions that are detailed in this article. The deadline for proposal submission is Tuesday, 11 February 2020.

Plans are underway to resume the The Polar Technology Conference ( as a biennial meeting, with funding from NSF's Office of Polar Programs. The 2020 meeting, to be held in Boulder, Colorado during 10–12 March, intends to provide an opportunity for technical and theoretical exchange on challenges impeding polar research and field operations.

The Arctic Data Center, a repository for all National Science Foundation-funded Arctic research data, released a refined semantic search interface in September 2019 as part of their data discovery platform. This new search interface, using semantic annotation to data files, offers a way to standardize the descriptions of data from a range of disciplines and diverse formats. This enables researchers to better search archived data and to better understand the contents and implications of the data from other efforts.