By Emily Schwing on December 13, 2023
“The Arctic Permafrost Atlas, which took years to create, is both beautiful and sobering, given the pace of climate change.
“Emily Schwing: Imagine the entire Earth. Now think about the places where all the ground is frozen solid. Do you know where they are?
“What if I told you that permafrost isn’t only found at the poles and that it exists under the sea, on the Tibetan Plateau and on top of North America’s Rocky Mountains?
“For Science, Quickly, I’m Emily Schwing.
“For more than six years, researchers have been working to account for all of the planet’s frozen ground as part of the NUNATARYUK permafrost research project. They’re also going one step further to document who lives on permafrost, makes use of it and what its cultural significance is.
“What’s come of their effort is the world’s first and only permafrost atlas of the entire Arctic.
“Levi Westerveld: So, it’s a coffee-table atlas that you can open anywhere and start reading and learning about permafrost.
“Levi Westerveld is a geographer and cartographer. He worked as an editor on the Arctic Permafrost Atlas.
“Westerveld: I think one of the first questions we ask ourselves is: What was the ultimate goal of the atlas, and what was the audience we were trying to reach? And quite fast, I think it became clear that we wanted to create something that was very accessible for policy makers who might not have heard of permafrost before to children and schools that are interested to learn more on the topic.
“Schwing: What came of the project is a nearly 160-page document loaded with dozens of maps, high-resolution images, and charts and graphs that explain what permafrost is, how it behaves in the Far North, how it’s changing and who those changes impact.
“Paul Overduin is a geoscientist at Germany’s Alfred Wegener Institute Helmholtz Center for Polar and Marine Research. He also worked on the project.
“Paul Overduin: We were looking at natural sciences and social sciences. So, we really had to kind of take a step back and get kind of a big picture of who works in the areas where there are permafrost, who works with people who live on permafrost. And then we started to look at “Well, what are the- what’s the output going to be?”
“Schwing: It’s a document Paul hasn’t grown tired of looking at, despite years of work.
“Overduin: I just remember being a kid and just loving atlases. Like, just these big pages, and you turn them over … finding out about some part of the world you hadn’t even imagined. That’s what the atlas should do. I think it should also kind of open up your imagination a little bit.
Read/hear the full article/podcast here.
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