 My name is Tony Lufkovich. I'm a professor of geography at the University of Ottawa and my field is permafrost science. So I'm trained as a geographer, but I started out working more in the area of hydrology and geomorphology, but in the arctic, and then moved more into studying permafrost as an object of study. So when you're working in hydrology and geomorphology, those are really influenced by the presence of permafrost. But now I'm at the point where I'm studying the permafrost and particularly permafrost distribution and changes through time. So I guess that's where my research relates to climate change, as almost anybody who works in the polar regions now says their work relates to climate change one way or another. Climate change has impacted the permafrost in multiple ways. The challenge is that it's not that simple. It's easier to see relationships between climate change and some of the other elements of the cryosphere like sea ice or land ice or snow than it is to see the relationship between climate change and permafrost because permafrost is hidden. It's underground. Permafrost is really crucial because it's the only element of the cryosphere that people live on year-round. People travel on the sea ice, but they don't live on it. They don't live on glaciers, but they do live on permafrost. And so, as permafrost changes take place, then the climate change, the long-term climate change, is going to have major impacts on northern populations. I like to describe permafrost as being like defrosting a turkey. If you take a turkey out or a chicken out of your freezer, it's going to be a minus 20 or so depending on how you keep your freezer. If you put it on the countertop and you stick a thermistor into it and I've done this, then what happens is the temperature warms up quite quickly to very close to zero. And then it sits just below zero for a very long time. And the reason it does so is because the heat you need to change the ice within the chicken's tissues into water is a lot of heat. It's the latent heat of fusion, whereas when you're warming it up, you add much less heat for every degree change. It's the specific heat of the material, in this case a frozen turkey or a frozen chicken. So it sits and sits and sits and then once it goes through zero, then it warms up again quite quickly and that's the point where you definitely don't want to eat it because it'll have all sorts of bad things in it. So in terms of what's happening to permafrost, if the permafrost is sitting at minus 15, it's quite easy to warm it to minus 14. But if it's sitting at minus a half a degree, it's very hard to warm it to plus a half a degree. And so curiously enough, when we look at changes to permafrost, we see that the cold permafrost is changing faster in terms of temperature than the warm permafrost because it's just hanging on, waiting to try and thaw. It takes a lot of new energy getting into the ground, a lot of surplus energy getting into the ground to create that thaw. So we see that in the high Arctic of Canada and elsewhere in the high Arctic in Russia and Alaska, the cold of the permafrost is the more it's reacting as a thermometer, it's a good thermometer. When it reaches very close to zero, it's not a very good thermometer anymore. But of course that's the part that we really care about because that's where we'll see changes happening to infrastructure or changes happening to hydrology as we lose permafrost. And so a lot of my work, we're working actually at the real southern fringe of permafrost in a right where it almost doesn't exist anymore and at that point it's not everywhere through the landscape, it's just in little patches. And one of our questions is how big are those patches? How are they changing through time? What's the temperature of those patches and what's their thickness? And so we're doing work along the Alaska Highway and the Yukon on that. And I've also worked in the high Arctic and I'm working with somebody from the Geological Survey of Canada, Sharon Smith, where we have a lot of boreholes in common where we're looking at temperature changes. We're looking at spatial changes, temperature changes and how those will impact through time, as I said, ultimately the people that live there. Remember that turkey takes a long time to thaw so what's happening is taking a long time. It's not disappearing overnight, it's not going to disappear overnight and some of the things that bug us as permafrost scientists is when we read, oh the permafrost area is going to diminish by this huge amount in the next couple of decades. It won't. It's going to be there for hundreds of years. We are seeing changes, but the changes happen slowly because you need all that additional heat to get into the ground to make things happen. What we don't know, what is hard to predict is when those changes may accelerate. So at this point they're happening relatively slowly. We did a study along the Alaska Highway in that very fringe zone so where the permafrost is quite marginal. There was a survey done in 1964 that we repeated in 2008 and the person who did the survey in 1964 who was a researcher from Canada from the National Research Council here was named Roger Brown and he went out looking for permafrost and so we can assume that the sites he checked were ones that were most prone to have permafrost at that time and he found a whole bunch of sites. So we went back and tried to find the same sites using a series of archival data to try and position ourselves and find the correct place. We can't be sure, but we're pretty sure that we were in the same places and of his sites half of those have lost permafrost since 1964. So over almost 50 years, a little less than 50 years there was significant change in that marginal zone and the southern fringe of permafrost because we saw that along the highway which runs basically southeast and northwest along the highway the biggest change was in the southern part and less change as we went towards the north which is exactly what we'd expect if this was climatically induced. And so we can see that southern fringe there has probably moved northwards by 50, 75, 80 kilometres so there's a boundary we say this is the boundary of permafrost of course it's a boundary in a landscape there's very few patches that are actually there and south of that now the patches that did exist have gone so we see changes there in terms of actual distribution there are almost certainly other changes taking place even in the places where there is still permafrost the ones that he found that still have permafrost because not everybody didn't disappear everywhere but we don't know what they are we are now making measurements of those sites and we might say there's 10 metres of permafrost there now well maybe there were 20 metres of permafrost when he did that survey but we have no way of telling and as we go further north then instead of looking at changes to the distribution of permafrost so much what we are looking at is changes of temperature and there as I said permafrost is a very good it's a very reliable way of measuring the long term impacts of climate because most of our sites where we are measuring ground temperatures are away from cities so one of the skeptical comments that gets put out is oh it's all just urban heat island these are in the middle of nowhere so it's not heat island effects and the second thing that happens with permafrost is it smooths out all the interyear variability all the entry year variability and much of the interyear variability as we go down further into the ground so it's a pretty good long term thermometer and there we can see that in the time we've been making measurements particularly in Canada in the last 30 to 40 years we have some pretty good long term records from Mackenzie Valley and from a few other sites that the permafrost is warmed by a degree or a degree and a half quite often over that time period so get rid of all the external potential problems what you've got is a good reliable long term thermometer and it's showing that the north is warming the answer is yes and no in terms of slow down because it depends where you are Canada is a big country we have a lot of time zones and in fact what we're seeing is that in some areas the warming has continued or even got faster and in other areas yes there's been a slow down and again that's a typical thing that's predicted by climate models but everybody tends to forget it so when we integrate everything globally we can see that things are getting warmer but locally they're not necessarily getting warmer so in fact some of the areas I work in in the Yukon have been fairly flat but at the same time in the eastern Arctic in Labrador and going up the east coast up towards Ellesmere Island things have taken off in terms of heating up the Arctic islands in particular really seem to have warmed up particularly in summer and I just saw some photographs that were taken of an area I've worked in on Ellesmere Island and these were taken by somebody who was there two years ago and it's just astonishing the number of thaw slumps that have been created there which is where permafrost gets exposed and the ice inside the permafrost melts and you get major reactions in landslides really that would be probably the best way to describe them there's a lot of them at some sites where I had been working at since 1985 and had never seen anything like that and now there's significant parts of the landscape that's being affected by thawing permafrost and melting ground ice I didn't do the survey in 64 so I haven't actually personally seen that and people often ask me oh you must have seen many changes I've been working in the Arctic since 1976 so that's a pretty long time and honestly it's not that easy to see them I think you need to go to particular ecological boundaries to see change if you go to somewhere that's very cold like Ellesmere is minus 14 or minus 15 as a mean annual air temperature if it goes up by a degree and a half there may or may not be a reaction in the landscape to that kind of a change or if you go to a place where it's bedrock bedrock is quite happy to be minus 14 or minus 15 doesn't care if you go to the right places places where there's a lot of ice in the ground and you go to the right zone which is moving from being a permafrost landscape to being a non-permafrost landscape that's how you're going to see those changes so they are, even today, those changes are happening locally rather than let's say across the whole Arctic we see advances of shrub cover into the tundra and it affects snow distribution which in turn affects permafrost or we see a thawing of peat plateau which have permafrost in and the marshes adjacent to them helping add heat into those peat islands and one of the questions where the jury is still out is whether the thawing of permafrost and the potential decomposition of the carbon will have a further important impact on global climate and I've just been at a conference so I can say that honestly the jury is still out we're seeing different things coming in from different studies as to whether you change a peat plateau into a bog well it turns out the plants grow quite well in the bog and that may actually be a carbon sink on the other hand if you change the peat plateau into something else it could be you'll get aerobic breakdown and carbon dioxide release so the carbon dioxide methane partitioning and the question of exactly what pathways will be followed as permafrost thaws is still an open question but there's a significant risk there because there's so much carbon stored in permafrost the publication on how much carbon was stored in permafrost only came out in 2009 so it's five years ago that we began to realise that there was twice as much as there is in the atmosphere and then it was a surprise and it shows how we're still capable of being surprised about the north and about the importance of the various components and that came out from people that worked on soils so soils if I may put it this way it's not the most sexy subject at least it's not to me of course if you're a podologist you might feel different and yet the result of basic basic research that was being done was finally put together through international collaboration into a sum total and then the answer came back this is a very serious question and I think that there are always going to be surprises like that in the north but probably in global science in general where we suddenly discover something that we're more or less ignoring and very few people have been working on is actually really very important I don't think we know what percentage risk there is but the worry is that the answer could be serious and so that's why I think we have to continue working on that question because we just don't have the answers right now and I can perhaps just explain and I sort of talked a little earlier about it but if we have carbon in permafrost and that permafrost degrades in a wet way so we end up with marshes or bogs or fens then we are likely to release methane of course if it decays in a dry way we are likely to release carbon dioxide and the methane is a much more important greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide so you can decay the same amount of permafrost with the same amount of organic carbon in it and one will have a much greater impact than the other and so we need to understand better if we degrade permafrost or as we degrade permafrost which pathway is more likely to be followed and we don't have that answer right now the Alaska Highway which I've referred to a couple of times so it runs from northern British Columbia up to the border with Alaska through the Yukon the last 100 kilometres is a mess all the rest of it is not too bad there may be permafrost in the terrain adjacent to it but there's no permafrost beneath the highway because of all the disturbance associated with the highway it's over the last since it was built in the middle of the Second World War but the last 100 kilometres there's permafrost beneath the highway and the problem is it's got lots of ice in it and it's thawing so the impact of the highway being there the throwing off of snow that takes place on either side which acts as an insulator in the wintertime building up of snow banks all add extra heat into the ground and a few years ago it was paved before that it was a gravel road we wanted an all-weather highway so we paved it and the problem is that Ashfort doesn't do well if you start lowering the ground but not lowering it uniformly, lowering it differentially so this part goes down by a metre and that part goes down by only 50 centimetres and guess what the Ashfort cracks in between and then you drive a truck over it and it all breaks apart so it's extraordinarily expensive for the Yukon highways department to maintain that last 100 kilometres of highway as it gets towards the border the reason is it's simply colder there so the permafrost has been preserved despite the highway being on it but the presence of the highway is causing progressive thaw well that's one example in terms of infrastructure another one that is now that we know about that is the most common example is simply everything costs a lot more because of permafrost so when we build a building on permafrost we may have to construct it in a way that will stop the permafrost from thawing great! so we put down piles or we put them on a gravel pad and all sorts of different techniques have been used so we can cope with permafrost and of course non-permafrost is the way everybody builds in the rest of the world so we know how to cope with that but you know there are no real techniques to cope with permafrost that will thaw so we put a building on piles and if climate warming then causes that permafrost to thaw the piles lose their strength they even before the ground completely thaws I'll go back to my chicken and turkey analogy at the beginning and say if you've ever tried thawing a turkey or a chicken on your countertop before it's completely thawed it kind of goes to this semi-resistant state where you can still feel there may be ice crystals inside the soil does the same thing as it's thawing so it loses strength even while some part of the water inside is still in ice form other parts of the water inside have now become liquid form and so of course it isn't as strong as it was when it was minus 5 it's now minus a half a degree or minus 0.2 of a degree so we know that buildings in that condition will start to have problems of their structure even before the permafrost thaws at a given site so we can cope with permafrost and we can cope with non-permafrost but that transition from permafrost to non-permafrost is really problematic we honestly don't have good engineering solutions for that there would be other impacts on the rest of the environment as an example when we have permafrost present then water flow is confined to the near surface generally so you get a rainstorm the water penetrates into the ground and it'll go to perhaps a meter depth until it reaches the frost table or what we call the permafrost table it's the deepest point that's thawed during the summertime so in a permafrost area the water tends to be relatively shallow in its pathways it infiltrates and then it goes sideways down to the local river eventually but if you have permafrost thawing then you'll start to have the possibility for that water to get deeper into the groundwater system perhaps depths to tens of meters so there will be a change in the way the rivers behave in an area where permafrost exists and where it begins to thaw simply because the pathways for that water will change and there have been some studies that suggest that you can pick that up even in big rivers so it may not even be a bad thing ironically it may allow rivers to flow more during the wintertime and somewhat be less flashy less prone to flooding in the summertime because water penetrates more deeply but the flow in the winter if it happens when it's cold you can get icings forming which are known in the Yukon and Northwest Territories where you get huge expanses in river valleys of ice layer building up one layer on top of the other on top of the other until it's meters thick so again maybe in a river valley that's not so bad but if you've got a small stream that's meant to go through a culvert underneath the road and that stream keeps flowing now and therefore it spreads ice out believe me if you've ever tried walking on one of these things you can't that they're just completely slippery and so then it becomes a problem for transportation again so that's one other example of how permafrost can or changes in permafrost can impact the rest of the the rest of the biosphere, geosphere, atmosphere another example would be that we expect greater landsliding so there are different kinds of landslides that are unique to permafrost regions one of which is called an active layer detachment and this is where the surface of the ground to a depth of perhaps a meter just basically slips off and goes downslope and normally you can't do that unless you turn the ground to mud to a very liquid mud so we get mud flows in areas where you get heavy rainstorms but active layer detachment can happen where the active layer, the layer that thaws in the summertime moves almost like a block and to do that you have to have virtually zero friction at the bottom of the active layer and that happens when you thaw the ground rapidly so if you put a lot of heat into the ground in summer at the time when the layer at the bottom of the active layer is slowly thawing, you'll thaw it faster you generate water and that creates an almost frictionless surface and so we see these active layer detachments move downslope similar to like the Greenland ice sheet where the water is lubricating the base of the glacier Yeah, that's a very good analogy, absolutely and I've done some studies of those on Ellesmere and one year we were lucky enough to be there when they happened and so I woke up one morning and looked up slow and went, that wasn't there yesterday and I'd been studying for about 20 years at that point but I'd never seen them happen nobody had ever seen them happen so when the ground detached the surface began to slide downslope our tents were down below, we weren't in any danger this is happening quite slowly but this small failure began with probably a slide of about 5 to 10 meters long and maybe 3 or 4 meters wide and over the next 4 days it progressed to be something close to 300 meters long and about 50 meters wide so the material slides downslope slowly and piles up there's a big mass at the bottom and there have been a number of studies since then not done by me but by other people of failures, the same kind of failures but looking at really what they do to the sediment balance in drainage basins to see what their impact is and they are almost certainly going to become more common as the summer temperatures in particular warm in the high Arctic so we're likely going to see more and the other studies done by a Queen's University showed that at least for a few years there's a serious amount of extra material that goes into streams which obviously can then have knock-on effects on the aquatic environment and on fish productivity and invertebrates and everything else is happening in streams so so many of these things are kind of domino effects where that was produced by a particularly warm period with a lot of sunshine that triggered a very small failure that then grew through the processes that are inherent to the permafrost being present and that then has the potential because a lot of them happening wasn't just one we happened to be camped downslope of one but they were happening all around us can then put extra sediment in the streams which has its own impact further down the line and I think that again our ability to get all the global all the impacts and really understand all of them is still quite limited we need further studies to really understand all of those things I think the most interesting question in the field at the moment is the one about carbon because it is imponderable but it's a real potential we don't have the answer to it but it's a significant risk and it could be that in 10 years time we'll say no problem or it could be we'll say wow we've got a serious issue here and I can't tell you I don't think anybody can tell you right now which is the correct answer because we're seeing different results from different individual field studies and our ability to upscale from individual field studies is not yet good enough for us to understand why some of them are showing sinks and some of them are showing sources not that we know of I would have to say not that we know of and there's some evidence some studies that say permafrost has endured for a very long time even in areas which are not that cold so in the Dawson area in the central Yukon there's been work that says we have ice wedges which are bodies of ice in the permafrost and above an ice wedge there's a tephra layer so from volcanic eruptions and the tephra can be dated and there's a study been done by Dwayne Froes from the University of Alberta that says above an ice wedge there's a tephra layer that's 600,000 years old so that should mean that the ice wedge had to have existed more than 600,000 years ago and made it through all the interglacial so in other words the permafrost had to have existed consistently because there's no way to reform an ice wedge beneath an intact tephra layer that really surprises me because the area is not that cold the ground there is maybe minus one and maybe minus two something like that so I would have thought it would have disappeared in the interglacial but apparently not so that suggests that and coming back to the comment about the stuff that yes we've seen change in the real southern fringe in the last 50 years but we've also seen persistence in the same area where some sites still have permafrost so it's not that easy to get rid of luckily for us perhaps well you might be able to tell from my accent in England so I did my undergraduate degree in England and then my supervisor for graduate work who was already at the University of Ottawa had done his PhD at the University of Southampton in England where I did my undergraduate and we made contact through his old links and then I had the choice of either staying in England and doing a PhD on glaciers in Switzerland joining the civil service or coming to Canada to work on a masters in the Arctic and I said you know I think of those three A the Arctic sounds more interesting and B it sounds more like I'll have a job at the end so that's how I ended up working on in the Arctic Do you do much communication of your science to the general public? Whenever I get the opportunity I'm really happy to do it I've given public lectures and if the press asks me for interviews I think that's part of every scientist's role nowadays we have to do our best to make sometimes quite complex things understandable and one of my colleagues once said to me he went on to do something important in one of the granting councils he said it's very important what analogies you choose so I use the frozen turkey analogy because many people at least have some experience of that it's not the best but it's not bad an analogy to use is a hockey analogy but I can never think of anything to do with hockey and permafrost try it out on your mother if your mother understands it then everybody else will too in the sense that she probably is going to go as my mother did well it's very interesting dear but I don't quite understand it all and so then it's your role to try and try and make it understandable my own feeling is that it seems to be more common among those who are geologists and I'm a trained as a geographer and I think that's something to do with time scales and I've certainly had students who've come up to me after taking a first year class from me where I've talked about climate change where one third of the class is all about how the radiation balance works and then eventually we come through to what the IPCC is saying and why would expect climate change and what the IPCC reports and a student came up to me and said but I'm taking a class from and he says it's all wrong and now what am I to think and my answer has been I have a lot of respect for that individual what he does in many parts of his science is very good because he's not just he's a climate change skeptic but he does lots of other things too and you'll just have to make your own judgement as to which one you think is true but obviously I then say but the percentage weight of those who believe in climate change hugely outweighs the number of those who don't and I use my own experience to say as I said earlier, permafrost doesn't lie you know it's one of the best ways I think we have of demonstrating climate change simply because it eliminates many of the many of the skeptical comments that are made about the long term records that we have from places like London or any urban areas and indeed when you go to Canada you know the climate record may be being influenced by urbanization or by change to agriculture and so on but it's very difficult to make that argument if you've got a site somewhere in northern Canada where the change is negligible there's something else that probably influences people I think as they think about climate change and I believe it's actually generational if the predictions we see in IPCC they'll be for 2050 or 2018 well for somebody my age I'm not going to see 2100 so you know perhaps I can just shrug my shoulders but and my children who are in their 20s they probably won't see 2100 either but I suspect when I have a first grandchild that will actually move my human horizon off by another generation and I've seen this with other people who said yes I've got to think about my who bit old me who's thinking I've got to think about what the world is going to be like for my grandchildren so when we're limited you know if you're younger you're probably not thinking that far but your horizon is a long way ahead but it will get pushed by another 40 to 50 years once you have kids and grandkids so I think that's an important thing for us all to remember because they will exist and they will exist on this planet and what's going to happen to this planet is worrying it's the tragedy of the commons I think you know we have the one atmosphere that's another message I think is an interesting one to put across and the way I do that is by taking the moon at a lower carbon dioxide record and then showing the alert carbon dioxide record because alert which is in the far north of Canada at 82 north that record didn't start until I think the mid-1970s but of course since then it's just tracked exactly the same way it's slightly different but the patterns are all there and the shape of the curve, the actual values are slightly different just because you're further north but it clearly shows what you put out in Hawaii has an impact on alert and vice versa and what's happening in China or India is the same as what's happening in Canada and the US and we're all having the same impact and it's the tragedy of the commons which until we get used to the notion of we all have to do less in terms of emitting carbon into the atmosphere then it's unfortunately it can be in everybody's local interest to say no, bad idea, bad for the economy well if my neighbour's going to do it why shouldn't I but if you take that to a different perhaps here's an analogy for that one which is that you and your neighbour are both playing music on your deck and he cranks his up louder so you make yours even louder in the end everybody suffers ah that's it simple we're just performing the greatest experiment on our own home and it's an irreproducible experiment it's a one off, it's like raising a child in that respect, it's one off and sometimes you make mistakes and sometimes you don't so let's hope we can learn enough to bring him back in line before he becomes an adult that's a nice analogy I guess the only thing is you can't have a second child that's right I think it's Mars, I think it's our escape option