Sessions

The full program with more details is available here.

• 1 - 15 years of APECS

  The opening session traverses the journey of APECS in its role in promoting education and outreach in polar studies, emphasizing the various working groups and activities organized by APECS.

• 2 - Role of SIOS in addressing Earth science challenges

  The Svalbard Integrated Arctic Earth Observing System (SIOS) is an international observing system for long-term measurements in and around the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard for addressing Earth system science issues. This session facilitates the introduction of SIOS, SIOS services, opportunities for early career researchers, and various ongoing activities under SIOS through talks.

• 3 - Cryosphere in a changing climate: challenges and opportunities

  Climate changes can significantly influence the cryosphere, as observed by the shrinkage of the ice masses at the poles and the high mountains. Ice sheets, glaciers, permafrost, snow cover, and sea ice extent are all observed to have critical mass losses in the cryosphere expanding to different spatial and temporal scales and resulting in long-term global and regional effects. This session deals with the impact of climate change on the cryosphere covering the Arctic, Antarctic, mountains, and permafrost. Topics can include: snow-glacier geophysical and hydrological processes; satellite monitoring; snow-ice melt; runoff anomalies and their impact on geomorphology, permafrost distribution and changes in lake and river ice; glacier-hydrology; glacier dynamics; methods and techniques in and/or succinct reviews on surface and sub-surface studies of glaciers, ice sheets, river ice, and permafrost for alpine and polar research and applications. For example, Quantarctica: An Antarctic GIS package; Perspectives on snow-glacier melt as water resources.

• 4 - Cryosphere-related hazards

  The retreating snow and ice can have imminent and spatially confined effects at the surface and sub-surface level often referred to as low probability and high impact events, e.g. flooding due to glacial lake outbursts and coastal erosion due to sea ice loss. The magnitude of such events is often amplified through interactions, often leading to cascaded events or chain reactions. For example, an avalanche debris flow can impact a glacier and enter a glacier lake, potentially releasing further debris flows or large amounts of water leading to floods. When these events interfere with human activity, the risk posed is often hazardous leading to harm and destruction of property, affecting the regional socio-economy and human livelihoods. This session is directly dedicated to discussing cryosphere-related snow and ice hazards, covering causes, effects, and useful techniques for monitoring and mitigation. This session can include the hazards of seasonal snowmelt floods, snow avalanches, glacier lake outburst floods, ice avalanches, marine debris flows due to glacial retreat, iceberg calving, ice jams, lake and river ice transport routes, ice floes, coastal erosion due to intensified wave action from sea ice loss, permafrost degradation resulting in ice mass wasting, ground destabilization due to permafrost degradation, sea-level rise, the release of greenhouse gases from permafrost thawing, seismological vulnerability and hazards in the cryosphere, impacts of oil spills in polar regions, snow droughts, etc.

• 5 - Climate variations, Earth system modelling and ocean-cryosphere interactions

  The components of the Earth system that interact with the cryosphere include the atmosphere, oceans, and biosphere. For example, ocean-cryosphere interactions play a vital role in the Earth system. Over the past half-century, the oceans took up 90% of the excess heat due to global atmospheric warming, causing changes in cryospheric components in contact with the ocean water. An adequate investigation and representation of these components are necessary to model the variations of the cryosphere through ice-age cycles and climate fluctuations and draw inferences on past changes. Future understanding of the climate also requires interpreting the complex interactions and feedbacks attributed to anthropogenic increases in atmospheric warming. Earth system models are used to retrieve information on all relevant aspects of the Earth system. Further, models may include representations of atmospheric chemistry and aerosols, ocean bio-geochemistry, dynamic vegetation, and cryosphere components. The contributions in this session may deal with but are not limited to the paleoclimate of glacial and interglacial periods, characteristics of the past and future climate reproduced by models, climate variations explained by climate and Earth system models, hydrological changes on all time scales, interactions between oceans, snow and ice masses on land, anomalies in sea ice salinity and temperature, the effect of oceanic warming on tidewater glaciers, deep formations and mechanism and monitoring of polynyas.

• 6 - Sustainable development, standards, laws, and policy research in cryospheric sciences

  Human well-being is linked to the cryosphere through various services. The cryosphere, in a way, also reinforces regional sustainable development. However, climate change-induced cryosphere deterioration has severely impacted these services and impeded the efforts toward meeting sustainable development goals, particularly in high mountain regions. A lack of understanding of the contributions of the cryosphere to SDGs further hinders the development of effective solutions for high mountain regions requiring reasonable optimization of cryosphere resource allocation and understanding of the linkage between SDGs and cryospheric services. This session explores this linkage through past, present and future designs for operational and societal infrastructure: coastal, hydrological, and alpine. Other topics covered by this session may include: human adaptation to the cryosphere environment, challenges, policies and laws for indigenous communities and natural resources, mentoring and outreach programs for discussing polar scientific research, application, and policies.