 I am Fabrice Calmes. I'm working for the Yukon Research Centre of the Yukon College at Whitehorse, Yukon, Canada, and I'm studying permafrost and north end geomorphology. So I am a permafrost scientist, so I'm studying frozen ground. I'm very involved in the impact of climate change on permafrost and how this end-use landscape change that may affect society. For example, when permafrost is degrading, there is a lot of settling that occur, collapsing, and if it occurs below buildings or infrastructures, so you can have a lot of damage. But also, if your landscape is changing, the activity of the people living on the territory may be affected by that. So I'm studying all the impacts from permafrost degradation. Permafrost is really a climatic phenomenon. It's there because you have cold air temperature all year long, so when you have this cold air, the ground starts to freeze and it exists for millennium. So obviously, when the atmosphere is warming, permafrost will be impacted because it's not now in equilibrium with the atmosphere, so permafrost starts to tower. So depending the kind of permafrost that you have, you can have no sign of degradation because permafrost contains no ice, for example, so when it towers, there is no loss of volume in the ground. But we can see the temperature of the permafrost warming. When you have what we call toe-sensitive permafrost, which means that it is a permafrost with warm temperature and also an important amount of excess ice in the ground, then you can observe a lot of phenomenon like landslides, collapsing, the formation of lakes and ponds. Presently, I'm working along the Alaska Highway and when permafrost is towing, you can see cracks appearing in the shoulder of the road. You can also have bombs forming, a lot of collapsing. Okay, so the cracks in the highway. So we made a calendar with different pictures of our research as a Yukon Research Center and this is a picture I took. So if you want to see the kind of cracks that we can have, that this kind of crack and why it forms is because you have a lot of ice in the ground and this is a picture of a permafrost core. So you can see because it is a cylinder, so we use a corer and you can see that all this part is pure ice. So of course when permafrost toe and it starts from the top of the permafrost, all the ice is melting and all the ground is knowing a subsidence. So the road has to be maintained on almost a yearly basis. They have to resurface the road constantly. For the Alaska Highway, it takes eight times more money to maintain than any other road in Canada. So yes, it takes a lot of money. We made also a survey in communities, in villages and we saw buildings affected by permafrost toe and the buildings start to tilt, some cracks appear in the walls, sometimes windows break because the building changes shape, the doors cannot close anymore. In one of the schools in the community in Whitehorse, one of the big glass in the window in the library just falls on the ground, there was nothing at the time. Sorry, there was nobody at the time, but it was like relatively scary for the kids. So permafrost is any kind of ground that is frozen at least for two consecutive years. It means that it can be bedrock in the mountains, it can be gravel and it can be any kind of sediment pit. The one that is the most problematic is a fine sediment, silt, clay, because in this kind of sediment, when permafrost develops, a ground ice named segregated ice forms. You have lands of ice forming each time that the permafrost progresses in the ground. So it's only, it's many occur in sediment soil and it's quite widespread at least in many areas of the world. This kind of fine texture sediment and permafrost is really common in a lot of areas in northern Quebec. In northern Quebec it is marine clay. In Northwest Territories it can be marine clay but also lake history and clay from the ancient Glacier Lake. You can have this in also in all the rivers channel. So yes, it's relatively widespread. No, it's hard to put numbers in it, you know. So I was talking about the school in the community of Forest River. They already, they made the first school at the end of the 70s and they rebuilt it completely in the early 2000s. So you can consider that each 20 years, sometime you have to rebuild your building. So life expectancy of building in permafrost is shorter than in other building. Now it depends also about how well the building was built. When you're trying to build on permafrost you want to make it in equilibrium with permafrost. You don't want to disturb the ground surface so you will try to build on gravel pad or to use piles and you will try to have air passing below the building to keep the permafrost cold and help the heat to extract from the ground. You can put a price on a building on a road but sometimes it's hard more to put a price on the health of people, the way the change of way of life in some cases is hard to quantify. Some people are living in the land, a lot of First Nations rely on their land to find food and supply. They hunt for specific animals, they live in specific environments and these environments are changing so the animals the fauna is changing too and they cannot hunt these animals anymore because the environment is not suitable for them so they will have to rely more on the food coming from the salt. How can you put a price on that? When permafrost degrades it's induced a lot of change in the landscape. You may have some forest in some area with permafrost underneath and when the permafrost is dewing we say that the forest gets drunk because the trees are tilting and all this forest is replaced by wetland, marsh, ponds, lake, so if you needed the wood the wood is not there anymore. If you have a trap line to trap animals for food, you have difficulties to access your sites because trees are collapsing or because there is a pond on your trail. Some animals are very attached linked to some specific environment like caribou. Caribou eat lichens and you can find a lot of lichens on permafrost mounds and permafrost plateau in some area. When this permafrost mounds and permafrost plateau disappear the caribou won't come here anymore. There are people gathering berries medicinal plants on this area so when the area disappears they lose this land for these activities. For sure, I think that ground is part of three very important elements for life. You have air, you have water, you have the ground. You're living on it, right? Except for a bird and you can fly all the time. And permafrost is frozen ground. When it freeze, the ground changes and when it tow, the ground changes back to something else. We are changing your environment and when we say, ground is solid, ground is certain. With permafrost is not the case because you can walk in a place one year and the year after, you cannot walk there. There is a lot of discussion about how permafrost, when it will tow or when it is tow, will have an impact on grain housegazes. So about how permafrost may produce grain housegaze because a soil that is frozen is relatively biologically not very active. You don't have a lot of bacterial activities. But a lot of permafrost occur in organic soils. When it starts to tow, there is a layer that we call the active layer which is the top part of the ground and that tow and freeze each year. If your permafrost is warming, this layer will become more and more thicker each year and all the elements contained in this layer will be reactivated. So there will be more bacterial processes, biological processes. In some cases, this layer, this permafrost contains gazes. So when the active layer is deepening, you will have more biological activity, more grain housegaze release, like carbon dioxide, methane. And we try to put a number on this gas emission because it's like a cycle. You know, chemical is warming, permafrost is towing, gazes are released. So the warming is even more important and there is a loop, a feedback. And so, yes, this carbon dioxide and methane release from permafrost is one of the current hot activity research. Originally, I come from Corsica, which is an island in the Mediterranean Sea. So very warm, very beautiful, mountain everywhere. And I made part of my study in oceanography. At some point in my study in France, I went in a laboratory that was specialized in periglacial processes. And it was about modeling some deposits, some coastal deposits. So you see the link with the scenography under a cold condition, making a tow-free cycle. And I was looking how this deposit was evolving. And I found that very neat, you know. And I was interested. I didn't know about the cold environment, but I got interested and I decided to come to Canada and to make a PhD at Laval University. Yeah, so it's like, you know, you cross paths in your life. But I was, if you asked me like 20 years ago, 20 years ago, no, I couldn't say that, oh, I wish to dip permafrost. The first thing you do is to listen and ask questions. Then after that you can talk. I think. Because you will know about their concerns, you know, about their problem. And then when you know them, you know what to say and what are the answers that they're looking for. And not, you know, only your own perspective. And yeah, well, I will explain how it works in your landscape, you know. I try as much as I can. You know, you have also to work. As much as I can, I try to communicate my results in conference. And not only with my fellow scientists, but also with all the people and the communities in the North. Of course, we try also to publish our results and make communication with the media to make the people aware about what we are doing. You know, I came in Ottawa for the Arctic Change Conference. I was at the European Conference on permafrost like four months ago. And before that, I went to a lot of workshops in Canada too. There is different kind of workshop about mountain permafrost, about the impact of permafrost and infrastructures. We went in other areas in the North to give a conference about the impact of permafrost on the First Nations and societies. Yeah. How to be pretty correctly correct about that. You know, I have a Darwin fish. Do you know the Darwin fish? It means like, I believe in evolution. At the difference that it's not a region, right? It is a theory, a scientific theory, relatively well proven for now. So, sometimes you have the things that you are dealing with irrational. It is belief. It is fate. It does not... People, it's hard to get some logic into their system. They are in their own logic and they also have like a circle thinking, you know? Like a snake, I think, is tail. So, it's very hard. I think that there are minorities but they speak a lot and they are very active. And when I prepared a course in geomorphology for Tabasca University, I wanted it to be very interactive. So, I put a lot of link to Vaideo's document and at some point I was looking for, you know, documentation explaining dating, dating technique, carbon dating and things like that. And I made that, you know, in Google and I was surprised because like half of the videos were about dating is crap. It was skeptical about evolution. It was skeptical about dating. And I said, wow, incredible. You know, I didn't believe about that. And at the very beginning of my geomorphology course I talked about... I talked about the very start of geomorphology when there was two theories that called uniformitarianism, you know, when the landscape did not move or evolve very slowly and catastrophism, when the landscape changed, you know, because there was evolution or things like that. And yes, I start to enter this world and I found out that there was more sometimes more prominent in the web to access large publics than scientists. And it was five, six years ago. No, I think that improved. But sometimes we should pick up more but trying to reach people with education put our videos on the web, explaining what we are doing, make it our search, you know, two or three minutes of video explaining what we are doing, our discovery, very simple, you know, just a video of you walking on the site and showing this is the first month, it melt and this is the lake. So I think that there are people that are skeptical, very motivated like, you know, and you have to sometimes, you know, you have to push excessively to counteract to this guy. Can we convince them? As I said, I don't think so. I might be pessimistic about that. But I think that's education and also they have the easy job, right? Because we arrive and we say, you know, climate is changing, it will be some impact, it can be difficult, we will have to cope with it, you know? As Churchill was saying, you know, I promise you the blood and guts, you know, or something like that. And they arrive and they say, well, don't worry, everything was going to be fine, all these scientists are crazy, there is nothing occurring, it is natural, everything gets back to normal at some point. Who do you want to listen? The guy with the sugar in the hand or the guy with the lemon, you know? Climate change is just like, usually you have a natural equilibrium that allows to have development of life and natural cycle to occur at a way, in such a rhythm that we can adapt to that, you know? It takes a million years to change from one temperature to another. Now we just put our feet on the accelerator and the engine is running very fast and we can start to be very late to push on the brake and I'm not sure that we can cope with all the changements that will occur because our industrial activities, right? Mainly that's the source of the problem. It's burning stuff. The problem is we are burning too much stuff. Gas, oil and that's affecting our atmosphere and our atmosphere now is warming so there is not, except if you come with a very special recipe to grab all the bad stuff in the atmosphere, I guess you have to slow down. My mother is kind of hard to explain what I'm doing to her because she is living in somewhere where thermofrost does not exist so we don't really care that she has no idea about how it may impact other people in the world.