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Category: Life at the permafrost lab

Pascale presented at the 2018 Yellowknife Geoscience Forum

February 5, 2018Written by pascaleroyleveillee

Pascale (and baby Florent!) participated in the 2018 Yellowknife Geoscience Forum, which had a very good turn out of permafrost scientists!

Pascale presented a poster with some data and thought son the Evolution of incipient lowland thermokarst features in the Blackstone River valley, Yukon (abstract on p. 108 of the Forum’s book of abstracts).

Pascale also presented a brief overview of the thermal monitoring and geomorphological mapping work carried by Maare Packalen, Jim McLaughlin, and Zlatka Pironkova in Ontario Far North. See Permafrost monitoring in the Hudson Bay Lowlands: preliminary results from the Ontario Far North in the Forum’s book of abstracts, p. 60.

The stirring committee of the new Canadian Permafrost Association used the opportunity to have a fruitful meeting in person. The new association should be up and running this summer! Kumari Karunaratne and Toni Lewkowicz gave a presentation to update the community and gather input regarding the mission statement, logo, etc. See The formation of a Canadian permafrost association in the abstract book of the Forum, p. 44.

Blackstone Uplands, Conferences, Life at the permafrost lab, Partnerships & collaborations, Publications, Yukon

Youngest lab member: Florent Léveillée-Renard born June 26th

January 18, 2018Written by pascaleroyleveillee

Welcome to our newest and smallest lab member, Florent Léveillée-Renard, born on June 26th, 2017. Florent went on his first field trip to the Yukon with Pascale this summer, at the age of 2 months. He was great help while visiting field sites along the Dempster highway.

Blackstone Uplands, Field work, Life at the permafrost lab, Yukon

Permafrost teaching lab: Doug’s scale model of oriented lakes

April 6, 2017Written by pascaleroyleveillee

Douglas Massel is an undergraduate student from the LU Outdoor Adventure Leadership (ADVL) Program. Potentially interested in pursuing a career as a field technician for research expeditions in remote areas, Doug added a minor in Geography to his ADVL degree, and focused on physical geography courses. In the permafrost class this year, Doug is writing his term paper on the orientation of thermokarst lakes. He added a scale model experiment to his paper, to examine the hypothesis that sediment texture affects the direction of lake elongation in relation to dominant winds, as proposed in Roy-Leveillee and Burn, 2015. Doug has been busy in the lab blowing wind over trays of wet sand and silt with puddles in them to look at circulation and lake expansion patterns.

Doug’s scale model: wind is blowing (upper left), sediment is moving (bottom left), Doug is watching his lake expand.

In summer 2017 Doug will be working as a field assistant in the Canadian NW Arctic with Chris Burn from the Carleton Permafrost Group. Best of luck Doug, and send some photos!

Life at the permafrost lab, Periglacial Geomorphology, Teaching

Wrapping up the first permafrost course at LU

March 31, 2017Written by pascaleroyleveillee

The new Laurentian University Permafrost course (GEOG4256) went well and was well attended, with 41 people registered in the class. Full time undergraduate students in the group were from a wide range of programs including Geography, Education, Environmental Sciences, Environmental Studies, Outdoor Adventure Leadership, Chemistry, Archeology, and Sports and Physical Education. A few mature students also joined the course, including people who have been involved in mining and reclamation work through careers in consulting, engineering, or geological techniques.

Group photo of the 2017 class for Permafrost (GEOG4256) at Laurentian University

Everyone has been working hard to learn the basic principles that control ground thermal regime, ground ice formation, and how permafrost responds to changes in surface conditions. The course was interspersed with hands-on exercises, opportunities for lab work, and assignments aiming to familiarize students with basic tools for data analyses of ground thermal regimes or back of the envelope estimations of thaw and frost penetration in the ground. The equipment and facilities used were funded by Goodman School of Mines, who have been supporting efforts to develop a training program in permafrost science at Laurentian University.

Left to right: Liam prepares buckets of saturated sand for freezing; Brandon and Chris assemble a frost tube, and Justin prepares small samples of silt and clay for texture analysis.

Each student also worked on a research paper where s/he explored a topic linking their interests or expertise to an aspect of permafrost. This year’s paper topics included:

the state of knowledge and common practices regarding building foundations, railway embankments, and frozen core dams in permafrost terrain;
the evolution of different permafrost landforms (pingos, ice wedges polygons, thermokarst lakes, and retrogressive thaw slumps);
the impacts of climatic change on permafrost, positive feedbacks, and methane emissions from thawing organics;
the state of permafrost knowledge and research in different regions of Canada and the world;
traditional knowledge and permafrost science;
wildfires and permafrost;
the impacts of frost heaving on the placement of artifact in relation to ground stratigraphy;
permafrost in political discourse and in the media;
risks and opportunities associated with methyl-hydrates;
mercury methylation in permafrost environments;
the integration of permafrost in the K-12 school curriculum.

Some of these projects, involved the use of GIS, remotely sensed imagery, or numerical modelling. Others included the development of scale models and experiments in the permafrost laboratory. Finally, some of the students from the Education program produced recommendations for the integration of permafrost-related topics in the Ontario K-12 curriculum, which will help train the next generation of Canadian permafrost scientists!