Monday 10th October starting at 7.0 pm.

Professor Mary Edwards from the Geography Department at Southampton University will be talking about The Big Thaw: a warming, changing Arctic

Mary Edwards considers the fragility of Arctic systems, drawing upon examples from Alaska, where she lived for several years, and Siberia, the largest northern land area affected by warming.

The Big Thaw: a warming, changing Arctic
We are rapidly becoming aware of the fragility of the Polar Regions in the face of climate warming. While global average temperatures have increased by half a degree or so over recent decades, the change in the Arctic has been much greater. I will draw upon examples from Alaska and Siberia to illustrate arctic warming and its consequences. Currently, much of the far north is affected by permafrost—permanently frozen ground—and landscapes and vegetation reflect the condition of the ice that underlies the surface. Responses to changes in permafrost are often dramatic. Warming-induced loss of ice from both land and sea has a range of consequences that not only affect the Arctic region but can be world-wide in their impact. The lifeways of indigenous people are being changed, there are new technological challenges, and the cycling of carbon between arctic lands and the atmosphere is being altered. Learning from the past, especially past warm periods, can help understand current changes. They are not necessarily novel, but they are taking place extremely fast, and whether arctic nations can adapt to them effectively is a critical question for the coming decades.

Professor Mary Edwards
Mary Edwards is Professor in Physical Geography at the University of Southampton and Visiting Professor at the University of Tromso, Norway. Her interests are centred on global environmental change: understanding climate-driven changes in landscape, vegetation, and ecosystem processes over a range of timescales. Her main geographic area of interest is the boreal-arctic region, and recent work relates to boreal forest dynamics, including fire disturbance, thermokarst, and hydrological change.