EMES Colloquium Speaker: Sarah Cooley

Investigating climate-driven changes to landfast sea ice at the community scale 

Landfast sea ice represents only a small fraction of the total sea ice in the Arctic Ocean yet has a hugely outsized importance for Arctic coastal communities. As a stable platform that can extend tens to hundreds of kilometers from land, landfast ice protects the coastline from erosion, provides an important habitat for marine mammals, and serves as a vital surface for transportation and traditional subsistence activities. In this talk, I will discuss our research into climate-driven changes to landfast ice. I will first present two studies which use satellite data to investigate climatic drivers of landfast ice change in Greenland, Northern Canada, and Alaska. I will then discuss my experiences with fieldwork and community engagement in Arctic coastal communities and how these experiences have informed our continued research into climate change and the Arctic coastal environment.