How can Thermokarst Lakes be Incorporated into Climate Models? Thermokarst lakes are numerous and dynamic and play a significant role in the Arctic hydrology and climate. Until now, however, there has been no way to represent these typical Arctic bodies of water ...

Here is a press release with a plain language summary of the study: mpimet.mpg.de/en/communica...

Stochastic modelling of thermokarst lakes: size distributions and dynamic regimes Abstract. Thermokarst lakes are among the most common and dynamic landscape features in ice-rich lowland permafrost regions. They influence carbon, water and energy fluxes between atmosphere and land ...

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/...

Quote card with Annett Bartsch portrait and text: ‘Monitoring permafrost from space is challenging, but we can reveal the expanse of thaw, exploiting various types of satellite records"

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

Study shows thawing permafrost releases much more greenhouse gas than expected Thawing permafrost emissions could accelerate climate change as Arctic soils become 25x to 100x more permeable, releasing much more gas.

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...

Image description: A laptop in the background. Text reads: ''How to get a European postdoctoral grant,' scheduled for Wednesday, 11 March 2026 at 17:00 CET. Includes a 'REGISTER NOW' button and the EGU logo."

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

Ice wedge polygon patterns at different stages after fire

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.

Introducing the new chief editors of the cryo blog New year, new team! We have some changes in our editorial team and would like to introduce our new chief editors to you today – please say hi to Mack and Leah! Mack and Leah will be taking over the ro...

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...

New report finds the Arctic continues to warm faster than the planet as a whole This year's Arctic Report Card from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration finds that the northernmost part of the Earth is warming faster than the global average, leading to melting glac...

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...

From record warming to rusting rivers, 2025 Arctic Report Card shows a region transforming faster than expected The 20th anniversary of the annual report tracks how sea ice, snow cover and many other vital signs of the Arctic have changed, and the impact that’s having on people and wildlife.

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-...

Alaska Native villages have few options and little US help as climate change devours their land Storms that battered Alaska’s western coast this fall have brought renewed attention to low-lying Indigenous villages left increasingly vulnerable by climate change.

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

High-resolution inventory and classification of retrogressive thaw slumps in West Siberia Abstract. Permafrost thaw disrupts ecosystems, hydrology, and biogeochemical cycles, reinforcing climate change through a positive permafrost-carbon feedback loop. Thaw can be gradual, deepening the a...

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...

Klimawandel: Und plötzlich war kein See mehr da In Alaska verschwindet binnen Stunden ein See. Der Grund: tauender Permafrost. Forscher wollen nun wissen, wann das System kippen könnte und ganze Landschaften verändern.

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....

Typhoon leaves flooded Alaska villages facing a storm recovery far tougher than most Americans will ever experience ‘As the storm approached Alaska, everything went sideways,’ leaving people no time to evacuate and little time to prepare. An Alaska meteorologist explains what happened and the challenges ahead.

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...

Sea-level driven isolation of glacial plant refugia revealed by submerged lake sediment from the Bering Land Bridge and St. Matthew Island Bering Land Bridge (BLB) climate and vegetation during the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM) remains largely understudied, given challenges associated with collecting records from the submerged BLB. Previ...

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...

Nice study with a large database of driftwood samples 👍. Carl will be venturing into various aspects of recent Arctic driftwood dynamics with remote sensing and AI over the next few years.

Thanks - yes, Carl is working on this.

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...

Retrogressive thaw slump in NW Canada

Thermokarst lake in NE Canada

The #PeTCaT team includes researchers from UAF, UofA, UHH, VUA, SU, WARC, ARI, and NTGS with expertise in permafrost, soil carbon, carbon fluxes, greenhouse gases, limnology, ground ice, plant-soil interactions, spatial analysis, remote sensing, deep learning, and process and Earth system modelling.

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: