Svalbard is thawing in April, and it’s not supposed to. 2026 ground temperatures at 0.2m depth in Svalbard spiking to 0°C in April, far exceeding the 1998-2025 median and maximum

Bringing #thermokarst lakes into global models is important for projecting #permafrost thaw in vast #Arctic lowlands. However, their rapid dynamics are challenging to model at scale. Reinken et al take a stochastic modeling approach and test various lake regimes: tc.copernicus.org/articles/20/...

Annett Bartsch has dedicated her career to understanding what's happening with ice beneath the surface. As Science Lead of ESA CCI+ Permafrost, she uses satellite data to track ground temperature changes across Arctic lowlands and mountain regions. Join her webinar: tinyurl.com/k6mhk53z

New laboratory experiments from the University of Leeds shows that thawing permafrost can become 25 to 100 times more permeable, allowing greenhouse gases to escape into the atmosphere much more easily than when frozen. www.earth.com/news/thawing...

If you're interested in the long-term development of polygonal ice-wedge terrain in Alaska after a tundra fire, then check out my newly published paper (or the TLDR version below 🙂) doi.org/10.1088/1748...

Interested in getting a European postdoctoral #grant, but hesitant to apply? This #webinar is for you! Together with Sílvia Poblador and Elsa Abs, they will share the best application tips! 💻: How to get a European postdoctoral grant 🕔: Wednesday, 11 Mars 2026 @17:00 CET 🔗 : egu.eu/6WAGBT

In her new paper, Tabea uses computer vision and graph analysis on high-resolution airborne lidar DEMs of fire-affected areas in Western Alaska to investigate the post-fire development of microtopography and surface hydrology in ice-wedge polygon landscapes. iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1...

📢 Call for Papers | Special Issue in Remote Sensing of Environment We are excited to announce a forthcoming special issue in Remote Sensing of Environment focused on the rapidly evolving area of Geospatial Foundation Models and their transformative potential for environmental remote sensing.

New year - new team! Today we would like to introduce you to the new chief editor team of our #cryoblog: please say hi to Mack and Leah! 🥳❄️ @mack-baysinger.bsky.social @leahsmuhle.bsky.social We would also like to say thanks to our outgoing chief-editor team! 💙 blogs.egu.eu/divisions/cr...

AWI researchers have reorganized the Global Terrestrial Network for Permafrost (GTN-P) database and made it publicly accessible. Since the 1990s, the GTN-P has collected high-quality data to monitor global permafrost changes and its role in the climate system. www.gtn-p.org

In 2025, the AWI and University of Bremen secured extensive data sets from the USA. Now, the @dfg.de has approved around €860,000 in funding to systematically identify endangered data and secure it for the long term with the help of the PANGAEA data platform. ☁️📊 www.awi.de/en/about-us/...

Introducing the Maxar Open Data Plugin for QGIS 🚀 The Maxar Open Data Program provides free high-resolution satellite imagery to support global disaster response and recovery. To date, it has released around 150,000 images totaling ~14 TB, all freely accessible through the AWS Open Data Program.

PhD position with focus on modelling of ground ice formation and rapid thaw processes in permafrost landscapes now open in our PeTCaT project. The position is at VU Amsterdam: workingat.vu.nl/vacancies/ph...

🎁 A New Year’s gift to the geospatial community: a brand-new QGIS plugin that unlocks access to 80+ petabytes of satellite imagery and geospatial datasets with zero coding required.

Paleoclimatologist Jessica Tierney recently published a global temperature record covering almost the past half-billion years. According to her model, 50 million years ago, inland temperatures approached 122 degrees Fahrenheit. www.quantamagazine.org/climate-extr...

As long correctly predicted by global #climate models... "New report finds the Arctic continues to warm faster than the planet as a whole" www.npr.org/2025/12/16/n...

We’ve got a piece in The Conversation about the 2025 Arctic Report Card and the implications of 20 years of tracking rapid Arctic change. #Arctic #akwx #Climate theconversation.com/from-record-...

Storms that battered Alaska’s western coast this fall have brought renewed attention to low-lying Indigenous villages left increasingly vulnerable by climate change.

Nina published her new inventory of retrogressive thaw slumps in West Siberia, covering the Yamal, Gydan, and Tazovsky peninsulas. Thaw slumps evolve by rapidly melting ground ice in very ice-rich permafrost. The dataset is based on high-res sat data and manual verification. doi.org/10.5194/essd...

Die @zeit.de hat über einen See in Alaska berichtet, der aufgrund der Degradation von #Permafrost ausgelaufen ist und über damit zusammenhängende Forschung des @awi.de sowie Kooperationspartnern (Geschenk-Link): www.zeit.de/2025/44/klim....

I’ve got a short piece up in The Conversation on the catastrophic flooding in Southwest Alaska from ex-typhoon Halong and the challenges of recovery work. #akwx #ExtremeWeather #Alaska #AlaskaSky theconversation.com/typhoon-leav...

There aren't very many proxies of past sea level during the Last Glacial Maximum (27,000-19,000 ybp). Jones et al present a sediment core from Beringia that transitioned from being a lake to being submerged by the ocean during the early parts of the deglaciation. www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1...

The many uses of #driftwood: the first large-scale mapping of Arctic coastlines. #AWI Press release for Carl‘s paper using AI to map driftwood abundance along the North American arctic coast with Planet satellite imagery. www.awi.de/en/about-us/...

Water level in northwest Alaska available through AOOS data dashboard. #AlaskaSky #akwx #ExtremeWeather

Unser neues #permafrost Projekt PeTCaT @awi.de ist offiziell gestartet: Wir werden in den kommenden 5 Jahren mit einem großartigen internationalen Team zum schnellen Permafrosttauen forschen und einige der wichtigsten Fragen zum Permafrost-Kohlenstoff-Feedback beantworten: www.awi.de/ueber-uns/se...

I am happy to announce that we received major funding from Schmidt Sciences under their VICC program to study rapid #Permafrost Thaw Carbon Trajectories (PeTCaT). The 5-year project led by my team @awi.de partners with an international team to quantify how rapid thaw contributes to climate change.

UAF people and Fairbanks residents:

Our latest ground ice mapping. This time improved maps of the Mackenzie Valley and Delta regions, both areas with significant existing and proposed infrastructure. Behind the scenes we are modelling away in other areas toward Ground Ice Map of Canada V2 1/ www.researchgate.net/publication/...

Long-buried layers of saline permafrost seem to be accelerating climate change’s transformation of the Arctic. https://scim.ag/46AxH2E

Our new study led by Carl Stadie is using #deeplearning U-Net methods to train on aerial imagery and then analyzed ~32,000 high-res #PlanetScope images across 1.3 million sqkm of the North American Arctic #coastline, mapping close to 20,000 #driftwood deposits. @awi.de www.nature.com/articles/s41...

A new PNAS study links #permafrost thaw and water toxicity levels from metal concentrations. This is bad news for Arctic rivers, their ecosystems, and food chains: www.pnas.org/doi/full/10..... Salmon River in NW Alaska, once praised for its pristine waters, has turned toxic to aquatic life.

New @awi.de study by Inauen et al developed a machine learning method to map landscape-scale #permafrost thaw such as baydzherakh development and thermo-erosion gully change in North Siberia with panchromatic historical Hexagon spy imagery and modern panchromatic sat imagery. doi.org/10.1029/2024...

The NSF-funded Arctic Research Consortium of the United States (ARCUS) will shut down at the end of Sept. ARCUS has been around since the late 80s; in recent years their staff had dwindled, and NSF said earlier this year that their grant would not be renewed. Another blow to polar science.

Study by researchers at the University of Gothenburg shows that almost half of the rising carbon dioxide emissions after the ice age may have come from thawing permafrost. phys.org/news/2025-08...

Öl- und Gaskonzerne haben Bohrschlamm und anderen Sondermüll im Permafrost verklappt. Der taut durch die #klimakrise, die Stoffe werden freigesetzt und vergiften die Umgebung. https://www.deutschlandfunk.de/vergessene-altlasten-tauender-permafrost-gibt-sondermuell-frei-100.html

New study where McKenzie Kuhn, I and co-authors show that accounting for differences among wetland and lake types is crucial for estimating current and future boreal-Arctic methane emissions – out now in Nature Climate Change. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Witnessing the rapid and extensive thawing of permafrost in Svalbard is truly impressive but deeply concerning

A very successful Perma-X campaign is ending now and both the Polar-5 and the team left Inuvik. We are looking forward to analyze a mountain of >30 TB of new data collected to better understand how fast #permafrost thaws and subsides, coasts erode, and lakes and vegetation change. @awi.de

The vastness of the Mackenzie Delta is impressive. A beautiful landscape formed by one of the largest Arctic rivers, affected by #permafrost, shifting delta channels, lakes, ice, and a harsh Arctic climate right at the land-ocean interface. An ecosystem ranging from tundra to boreal forest.

Now surveying thawing #permafrost landscapes of the Mackenzie Delta region, home of the #Inuvialuit and #Gwich’in people, during the Perma-X 2025 airborne campaign based out of #Inuvik in #Canada. Our platform #AWI Polar-5 is a refitted DC-3 BT67 equipped with high res cameras and lidar sensors.

Great to see our work in @eos.org ! A good read for the evening! 😇 kudos to all our friends & colleagues that contribute to this ongoing endeavour - there is so much to learn! 🤩 together - always! @thomasopel.bsky.social @juvmcburst.bsky.social @pucicu.de @scitobias.bsky.social @leverhulme.ac.uk

“It's our job to learn, then empower and allow [communities] to create things important to them, prioritize projects important to them, and provide tools and resources.” Great conversation with our collaborator Jackie Qataliña Schaeffer about adaptation planning and Indigenous infrastructure.

Concluded our West Alaska #permafrost studies for 2025. Had a great time in #Kotzebue with a strong AWI-UAF team, fantastic local partners, and mostly nice weather for boating, ATV travel, and tundra hiking. Studied lake drainage, hydrochemistry, erosion, subsidence, vegetation, & paleo-permafrost.

The term “abrupt permafrost thaw” is increasingly used in the scientific literature. The concept comes with challenges as authors look at “abrupt“ change with different perspectives on time scales, magnitudes, and impacts. Webb et al developed a new conceptual framework: doi.org/10.1007/s406...

First week of #permafrost work in #Kotzebue on the Baldwin Peninsula is completed with surveys and sampling of the impressive Cape Blossom, a large hillslope drainage gully east of Kotzebue, and the drained thermokarst lake basin at the Schaeffer family home. Several more days to come…

On our way to #Alaska 🛫💫 for fieldwork around Kotzebue on the Baldwin Peninsula 🇺🇸, a region strongly affected by permafrost thaw as seen in the ALEX portal alex.awi.de. At the same time, our Perma-X #permafrost airborne campaign with #AWI Polar-5 will start in #Inuvik in Northwestern Canada 🇨🇦 🍁

We continued our studies on what happens biogeochemically (carbon, nitrogen, lipid biomarkers, mercury), when terrestrial #permafrost transitions from land to aquatic environments such as thermokarst lakes and lagoons with an example from the #Alaska North Slope: doi.org/10.5194/bg-2...

Detailed investigations of permafrost deposits in Arctic Siberia suggest a much warmer Last Interglacial than today for that region: new Study out by Schirrmeister and a larger international team of colleagues: doi.org/10.5194/cp-2...

I have a fully funded PhD position open for start in Jan or May 2026. Field work in peatlands of the Northwest Territories, with lab work to understand potential downstream mobilization of carbon, nutrients, mercury after thaw or wildfire. Reach out for more information, and please send on!