Arctic coastal communities face growing risks from permafrost thaw, coastal erosion, and ground instability underneath infrastructure as the climate warms. When ice-rich permafrost thaws, the ground can sink or settle unevenly, damaging infrastructure,speeding up coastal erosion, while also altering drainage and flow patterns, potentially increasing water accumulation and flood susceptibility in low-lying areas. Mapping these hazards accurately requires knowing how much ice is in the ground and where it occurs. Current models and maps often assume that fine-grained soils, such as clay and silt, hold a lot of ground ice and are therefore highly prone to thaw-related settlement. However, recent coring in the High Canadian Arctic (Grise Fiord, Nunavut) revealed unexpectedly ice-poor saline (salty) permafrost, challenging existing assumptions and suggesting that some hazard maps may  overestimate settlement risk in certain areas while overlooking others. Because many infrastructure in Arctic communities are situated on fine-grained marine and coastal sediments, it is important to better understand how ice forms in these soils to improve predictions of their distribution.

Tasks:

• Conduct controlled laboratory experiments with specialized freezing-cell equipment to study how salinity, temperature, and pressure affect ground ice formation in saline soil samples collected from Grise Fiord in Canada and Kangerlussuaq in Greenland.

• Conduct CT scan analyses to generate high-resolution 3D images of ice structures and water migration during freezing. These images will be compared to CT scans of natural permafrost samples collected in the field.

• Determine the freezing behaviour and ice-segregation potential of Arctic fine-grained saline soils under controlled laboratory conditions and their thaw-sensitivity when located underneath transportation infrastructure along the coastline.

• Funding is available to present the research results at a conference in Europe or internationally.

Supervisory team: Julie Malenfant-Lepage and Benoit Loranger (NTNU, Norway), Thomas Ingeman-Nielsen (DTU, Denmark), Daniel Fortier (University of Montréal, Canada), Stéphanie Coulombe (Polar Knowledge Canada).

Research project financed by Polar Knowledge Canada

Interested?

To submit your application, please contact Julie Malenfant‑Lepage at julie.m.lepage@ntnu.no