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Report from the international permafrost association: Third european conference on permafrost (EUCOP III) in Longyearbyen, Svalbard

2010; Wiley; Volume: 21; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1002/ppp.711

1099-1530

Hanne H. Christiansen, Bernd Etzelmüller,

Methane Hydrates and Related Phenomena

The European Conference on Permafrost was held on permafrost terrain for the very first time, from 13 to 17 June 2010. Two hundred and forty one scientists and engineers travelled to the University Centre in Svalbard (UNIS) in Longyearbyen at 78°N to attend the Third European Conference on Permafrost (EUCOP III) (Figures 1 and 2). Participants represented 27 nations with the largest numbers from Germany (36), Norway (35), Switzerland (21), the United States (20), Russia (18), Canada (17), Sweden (17), France (16), Denmark (7), Portugal (7), Austria (6), Finland (6), Italy (6), Spain (5), Korea (4) and China (3). Of the total participants, 171 were from Europe and 77 were students. Thirty-one per cent were women and 69 per cent were men. The high student participation rate was assisted by a low registration fee and the availability of inexpensive accommodation for this group. EUCOP III participants in front of UNIS, 15 June 2010. Photo: Stephan Vogel. This figure is available in colour online at wileyonlinelibrary.com. Conference participants visiting the ice-wedge research site in Adventdalen on the half-day field excursion, and listening to results presented by Norikazu Matsuoka and Hanne H. Christiansen. Photo: Stephan Vogel. This figure is available in colour online at wileyonlinelibrary.com. It was decided at the Second European Conference on Permafrost in 2005 that the next European conference would focus on the polar areas and the output of the Fourth International Polar Year (IPY) 2007 − 08. Thus the EUCOP III was planned to highlight the ‘Thermal State of Frozen Ground in a Changing Climate During the IPY’ and showcase the various outputs from the different permafrost research fields obtained during the IPY, including the first international overview of the thermal state of frozen ground. The International Permafrost Association (IPA) Executive Committee approved the EUCOP III as a Regional Conference on Permafrost in December 2008. An International Organising Committee with 20 members from Europe, Russia, Canada, USA and Japan was formed, as well as a Norwegian Organising Committee with 21 members from science and engineering, and these committees were responsible for the development of the conference. The Norwegian Organising Committee met in June 2009 in Oslo, and both committees met for a one-day workshop in Oslo in March 2010 to design the scientific programme based on the 284 abstracts received. Each day of the conference started with two plenary oral keynote presentations. The keynotes focused on results from the IPY in lectures entitled ‘Thermal state of permafrost − an overview and status of the activities in the polar northern hemisphere’ presented by Vladimir Romanovsky, ‘State of periglacial research at the end of the IPY’ by Norikazu Matsuoka, ‘Remaining challenges in permafrost carbon research − a status at the end of the IPY’ by Peter Kuhry and ‘Where, how fast and why arctic permafrost coasts undergo coastal erosion’ by Hugues Lantuit. In addition, keynotes on ‘Permafrost research in Norway and Svalbard’ by Ole Humlum and ‘The development of infrastructure on permafrost in Svalbard’ by Arne Instanes were presented to introduce local permafrost science and engineering research. The main part of the conference programme consisted of four 2-hour blocks, each with three parallel sessions of 15-minute oral presentations, resulting in a total of 96 oral presentations. Almost twice as many presentations were given as posters, organised into two dedicated sessions, totalling 188 posters. Eleven different session themes were chosen to cover permafrost science and engineering. The largest number of presentations was in the geophysical monitoring in permafrost regions session, with eight oral presentations and 44 posters; the second largest was the periglacial processes and landforms session, with 16 oral presentations and 24 posters. An open public lecture, ‘The unintended research legacy of John Munro Longyear’, was given by Frederick Nelson, University of Delaware, USA, to participants, Longyearbyen residents and visitors in the evening of the first day of the conference. The Permafrost Young Researchers Network (PYRN) organised a special PYRN social event sponsored by The Cryosphere. The scientific output from the conference is given in the book of 284 one-page abstracts of all accepted presentations, reviewed by the two committees (Mertes et al., 2010). Delegates to the conference received this, and all other written material for the conference, on a specially designed memory stick. As a result, more than 65 000 pages did not have to be printed and the planes carrying the EUCOP participants out of Svalbard were many kilos lighter. Hosting the conference in Svalbard had the enormous advantage of enabling a significant field component (Figure 3). One half day of the conference was used to introduce participants to the science and engineering activities in and around Longyearbyen. During this half-day field excursion several EUCOP papers were presented orally and they were also given as poster presentations in the indoor part of the conference. The field sites visited were ‘Svalbard Airport and the seed vault’ presented by Ivar Horvli, ‘House infrastructure in Longyearbyen − UNIS on poles’ presented by Arne Instanes, ‘Solifluction in Endalen’ presented by Antoni Lewkowicz, ‘UNISCALM and TSP boreholes in Adventdalen’ presented by Håvard Juliussen and Ketil Isaksen, ‘Longyearbyen slope processes’ presented by Ole Humlum and ‘Ice-wedge process research in Adventdalen’ presented by Hanne H. Christiansen, Norikazu Matsuoka and Tatsuya Watanabe. Participants were transported between the six major field sites by bus and escorted by two EUCOP guides, who were UNIS or University of Oslo Ph.D. or Master students participating in the conference, or UNIS student helpers. The field excursion ended with a large Arctic outdoor barbeque which took place under sunny skies in downtown Longyearbyen outside the SAS Radisson Blu Polar Hotel. The conference ended with seven different one-day excursions given over two days which were either free or available at low cost: a walking tour of the Longyearbreen and Larsbreen glaciers guided by Håvard Juliussen and Jordan Mertes; a walking tour to Gruvefjellets TSP boreholes, avalanche sites and rock glaciers guided by Ole Humlum and Stephan Vogel; a walking tour of the Hjortfjellet rock glacier and the first settlement of Advent City guided by Ketil Isaksen and Rune Ødegård; a walking tour of Todalen visiting periglacial slope landforms including active avalanche sites guided by Lena Rubensdotter and Markus Eckerstorfer; a visit to the Russian mining town of Barentsburg guided by Nataly Marchenko; a visit to the mining settlement of Svea by the local coal mine company guided by Malte Jochmann; and a field trip to observe remote sensing of the periglacial landscapes of Svalbard with a UAV demonstration and including a visit to the Svalsat satellite-receiving station, guided by Tom Rune Lauknes and Ulrich Neumann. The one-day field excursions were a huge success, so much so that there were not enough spaces on some, but all who wanted to participate were accommodated on at least one of them. On the first day, 154 conference participants walked, sailed and visited five different sites, while on the second day, 83 participants attended five excursions. The conference produced many different kinds of results, but of course the scientific results are the most important. The circumpolar permafrost thermal snapshot presented during the conference, based on the many local, regional and international presentations, clearly showed that the warmest permafrost this far north in the northern hemisphere during the IPY 2007 − 09 is present on Svalbard. The international coordination, which was significantly improved by the IPY, led to the organisation through different international IPY permafrost project clusters of a special issue of Permafrost and Periglacial Processes (PPP) (Vol. 21, Issue 2) entitled Permafrost in the Polar Regions during the International Polar Year. This issue was launched the week before the EUCOP III at the IPY Oslo Science Conference in Oslo and free access was provided to all six research articles, the editorial, a short communication and the report of the IPA on the IPY permafrost legacy. ‘There has never been such a proud time in the history of permafrost research’ said Professor Hans Hubberten, President of the IPA, at the conference closing session. ‘This conference is a result of taking the IPY momentum to bring together scientists, engineers, different research fields, young and old people together − to go further in the future.’ Several student prizes were awarded during the conference. The winners of the PYRN awards were: Britta Sannel (Stockholm University, Sweden) for the best international poster ‘Warming-induced destabilization of peat plateau/thermokarst terrain’ (A. B. K. Sannel and P. Kuhry) and Marc Oliva (University of Lisbon, Portugal and University of Barcelona, Spain) for the best international oral presentation ‘Long-term solifluction response to increasingly arid conditions in Sierra Nevada, southern Spain’. The awards were sponsored by PPP (Wiley-Blackwell). In addition, two prizes were awarded for the best oral or poster contribution on a topic within the host country, sponsored by the Norwegian Journal of Geography and its publisher Taylor and Francis. These were given to Kjersti Gisnås (University of Oslo) for her poster presentation ‘Regional scale mapping of permafrost distribution in Norway using the TTOP model’ (K. Gisnås, H. Farbrot, B. Etzelmüller and T. V. Schuler) and Håvard Juliussen (University Centre in Svalbard) for his poster presentation ‘Active layer freeze and thaw dynamics revealed by year-round electrical resistivity tomography in Svalbard’ (H. Juliussen, A. Oswald, T. Watanabe, H. H. Christiansen and N. Matsuoka). The IPA Council and Executive Committee met at the EUCOP and the results of these meetings will be the topic of the next report from the IPA in PPP. The total conference budget was around 50 000 Euros. The Norwegian Research Council was the main sponsor of the conference with a contribution of 25 000 Euros. Other institutions that directly sponsored the event included the Caixa Geral de Depósitos, Portugal, The Cryosphere, Taylor and Francis and the Department of Geography, University of Technology and Natural Sciences, Trondheim, Norway. PPP (Wiley-Blackwell) provided student prizes and free access to the special IPY issue. In-kind sponsorship was provided by institutions that had staff working in the national committee for the conference, including the Geological Survey of Norway, the Northern Research Institute, the Norwegian Meteorological Institute, the Norwegian Geotechnical Institute, Vianova Plan and traffic, and the high school in Gjøvik. The other two main in-kind sponsors were our own institutions, the Department of Geosciences, University of Oslo and the Geology Department, University Centre in Svalbard, UNIS, which together allowed us to host this conference. Only weeks before the conference, Svalbard was cut off from the rest of the world by Icelandic ash clouds, but in the end there were no problems with travel to Longyearbyen for the meeting, nor any unexpected encounters with polar bears once there. Despite the arctic location, it was possible to keep the registration cost relatively low and this included almost all of the meals during the conference itself. The significant challenge of having 241 conference participants in a village of 2500 inhabitants was met and all were accommodated successfully. UNIS had never hosted a conference of this size before, but the facilities proved to be superb for the presentations, poster sessions, ice-breaker and conference dinner. We believe that those that attended the EUCOP III regarded it as a major success. All elements of the meeting, from the technical programme to the accommodation to the field excursions to the food, were of very high quality. Most importantly, the EUCOP III provided the venue for the international community of permafrost scientists and engineers to discuss their work, exchange ideas and create personal collaborations that will continue to bear fruit in the years to come. As the main organisers of this conference we want to thank the many people and institutions for their contributions which enabled us to develop and run the EUCOP III in Svalbard: UNIS, which hosted the conference in the best possible way by not having teaching going on during the meeting, so that we could use all the facilities, including the student housing; the University of Oslo, Department of Geosciences; all the field EUCOP excursion guides: Malte Jochman, Tom Rune Lauknes, Ulrich Neumann, Lena Rubensdotter, Markus Eckerstorfer, Ketil Isaksen, Rune Ødegård, Ole Humlum, Stephan Vogel, Håvard Juliussen, Jordan Mertes, Nataly Marchenko, Arne Instanes, Norikazu Matsuoka, Tatsuya Watanabe, Antoni Lewkowicz, Ivar Horvsli, Hanne Christiansen, Stephanie Härtel and Kjersti Gisnås; Regula Frauenfelder who organised the poster sessions; Herman Farbrot and Stephan Vogel who were the conference photographers; Ivar Berthling (2010) who was the field guide editor; Ole Humlum who organised the half-day field excursion; Spitsbergen Travel and especially Anja Kristoffersen who managed the registration process; Jordan Mertes, the EUCOP III Conference Secretary, who worked from summer 2009 until the end of EUCOP at the same time as trying to work on his Master thesis. We wish you good luck with the thesis work and your future in cryospheric sciences, now that you know so many in the permafrost community. Seven UNIS geology students did an excellent job with the logistics around the conference: Wesley from the US, Maximilian from Germany, Peter from Switzerland, Alexandra from Russia, Samuel and Alexis from France, and Scott from Canada. Our thanks to all of those mentioned above. It was a very enjoyable experience to work with you!