The focus of our group’s research is on permafrost and the impacts climate change on its stability, centred regionally, in northwestern Canada. We are particularly interested in permafrost and how it has responded in the past, and is responding today, to climate change. This involves a mix of studies of the geologic setting of permafrost, community hazards and mapping of permafrost change.
Students and researchers who work in the lab study diverse problems using an equally diverse set of approaches. In keeping with this, much of our research is strongly interdisciplinary with ongoing collaborations with several groups working in engineering, ecology, evolutionary biology, microbiology, geophysics, geochemistry, soil science and paleoecology. Much of northern research, and in particular understanding environmental change, requires diverse points of view and these collaborations, including our work with indigenous groups in northern Canada, provide our group with expertise to tackle these problems.
At present, I co-lead Theme 1 Characterization of Ground Ice within PermafrostNet where we are looking to develop better laboratory and field estimates of ground ice, and improve our understanding of how permafrost thaws at a landscape scale. Several students in my group work on this project, and it is a central activity of our newly built Permafrost ArChives Science Laboratory (PACS Lab). PACS is a $4M facility dedicated to the characterization and analysis of permafrost materials, including non-destructive methods (computed tomography and multi-sensor core scanning), clean labs for biogeochemical and ancient DNA sampling and extractions, and analytical facilities (elemental, isotopic and physical samples). The facility is a multi-user facility with faculty from EAS, BioSci, Renewable Resources and Engineering.