Rosanne D’Arrigo of the tree-ring lab at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in New York recently told the story of Alaska’s year without a summer. She attended the fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union last month in Washington, DC.
Alaska villages facing coastal disasters may be able to use new erosion-monitoring tools as part of their decision-making arsenal, thanks to a pilot study led by the University of Alaska Fairbanks.
In October, the Yup’ik community of Newtok braced itself to lose four homes to rapid erosion as storms from the southeast removed dozens of feet of shoreline no longer protected by ice and permafrost due to climate change.
When constructing in the Arctic or near-Arctic regions of the world where permafrost dominates, the adage “If it’s frozen, keep it frozen; if it’s thawed keep it thawed” provides a strong foundation. Doing this, however, is one of the greatest challenges for engineers and construction companies that specialize in building in some of the coldest places on Earth.