Collaborative Research: Physical Feedbacks in the Coastal Alaskan Arctic during Landfast Ice Freeze-up

The loss of sea ice in the Arctic is increasing the exposure of the coastline to waves and storms. The timing and location of ice formation in the fall also affects how sediment moves through the region. The proposed work will explore how waves, storms, and sediment interact during fall in the Alaskan Arctic.

This new understanding will result in better predictions of ice formation at the coastline, which varies significantly in space and time. The project will use observations obtained from instruments deployed on the seafloor and from ships to watch how freeze-up occurs over a section of the coastal Alaskan Arctic. We will introduce new ways of making measurements in the Arctic, that are both cheaper and better-adapted to the harsh environment, which can be incorporated into future work.

These observations will be compared with seasonal and prior datasets to understand how the freeze-up may vary in different years. Scientists will engage with middle and high school students both locally (in the Arctic) and from the continental US. This work will focus on developing a coastal ocean unit, which teaches students about the science and walks them through building and deploying small instruments.

The rapid decline in landfast ice in the coastal Arctic is increasing the duration of wave exposure and strength of wave energy reaching the coast each year. Because landfast ice forms in shallow water, sediment entrainment into the ice also plays a key role in mediating export. The proposed work will address fundamental feedbacks and connections of physical processes on the Alaskan Arctic shelf during fall freeze-up.

This new understanding will enable better predictions of seasonal and decadal changes in landfast ice formation, which has a high amount of variability on multiple spatial and temporal scales. Analysis will also improve our understanding of the sediment pathways during the stormy fall period. The field experiment will use moorings, autonomous systems, and seafloor cables to capture the spatial and temporal variability in freeze-up processes over a region on the Alaskan Beaufort shelf.

The research will take a nested approach, utilizing seasonal observations and pre-existing inter-annual time series to capture the roles of offshore forcing, local hydrodynamic processes, and air-sea exchange. Measurements will be made using novel integration of multiple new low-cost telemetered sensors, amphibious drones, seafloor cables, and Arctic-hardened moorings, building capacity for future autonomous observing and monitoring systems adapted for the coastal Arctic.

Outreach efforts during the project will engage regional high school students, as well as students who have never experienced the Arctic. We will continue building on a “Coastal Oceanography” unit developed over the past four years for high schoolers in an Alaskan Arctic village, expanded to include the middle school, and incorporating virtual lessons with annual in-person activities to deploy small student-built instruments.

Additionally, we will establish ongoing engagement with middle school science classes in three locations with in-person visits prior to the fieldwork, live-stream events during the cruise, and follow-up visits afterwards.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.