Grant: Discovery Grants Program - Individual

Identifying and understanding key drivers and determinants of future permafrost thaw This research program will make projections into the future and predict how strong the effects of permafrost thaw will be in coming decades and centuries. Thaw refers to some or all of the ice in the ground melting. Some of this ice may have been in the ground for thousands of years and humans may never have experienced a world without it. Today, more than one-third of Canada has permafrost in the subsurface and because of human-made climate change, much of this area will experience thaw and undergo very strong changes as a result. People can respond to changes as they happen or chose to look forward and adapt to what will likely happen in the future. Usually, looking forward enables smarter and less costly solutions and this research program contributes to this by better understanding the behaviour of permafrost thaw. We will select relevant behaviours, for example the amount of surface lowering because of ice-loss in the ground, and study how it changes over time. In one place, there may be a lot of lowering at first and after a few decades, this will stop. At another place there may be no lowering for a decade but when it starts, it continues for two centuries. Being able to predict this will help to make decision about where we build and how we use the land. And because no prediction is perfect, we also study what the most important factors are that drive these changes and which of them we know least. All of this is done with computer simulation where permafrost models get their data from Earth-system models that project global climate decades or centuries into the future. To trust these models, we need to see if they do a good job in predicting what we already know and have observed in the past. And also, as scientists we have a chance to learn when the prediction and the observation do not match. This is why this research program has a second part that observes permafrost thaw and then tests and improves the computer models we use. This is especially important because we have little data and very little experience of measuring permafrost thaw. By investigating thaw with measurements and with computer models, we can learn how it behaves in a robust way. Measurements ground us in the past and models allow to simulate what we do not yet know. Students and other trainees are key reason to perform academic research and Canada urgently needs experts capable of preparing for and responding to climate change. This research program exposes students and trainees to a combination of computer-based work, fieldwork in the north and collaboration with northerners. Such multi-talented graduates will be able to put the research results into practice for government, industry and communities and through their diverse experience and skill contribute to building resiliency in Canadian society.