global climate change

Cool lessons from Utqiaġvik, Alaska

Rena Malai — Wed, 23 Aug 2023 17:21:32 +0000

Cool lessons from Utqiaġvik, Alaska Rena Malai Wed, 08/23/2023 - 13:21

This summer, computer modeling and the Arctic ecosystem converged at the top of the world. Professor Elise Miller-Hooks and a team of National Science Foundation (NSF) researchers convened at the Barrow Arctic Research Center. These NSF Navigating the New Arctic researchers traveled to the remote location to attend the Permafrost and Infrastructure Symposium in Utqiaġvik, Alaska, some 320 miles north of the Arctic Circle.

The symposium brought together scientists, regional planners, village leaders, project managers, and federal and local policy makers. The team attended to learn and grow their research–and to share. Miller-Hooks described what she learned as massive.

“It was nothing like I expected. When I entered Utqiaġvik, I found myself in a tough environment with mostly dirt roads. The other researchers told me these roadways are built on permafrost,” she said. “Later on, they convinced me to lower myself into a cave underground to see 16,000-year-old permafrost.”

Elise Miller-Hooks analyzes permafrost in Utqiaġvik.

The people of Utqiaġvik live on the permafrost and they still fish and whale in the surrounding seas, as they have for centuries. Whaling is not a hobby, or for profit. They whale to survive. It is their food supply and more.

“It [whaling] is their culture. It is what they raise their kids to do. It's what their songs and dances are about. It's truly everything. They say that if you take that away from them, it's like killing them,” said Miller-Hooks. All of this could be threatened by more shipping traffic as the polar ice caps shrink and Arctic sea ice diminishes.

Most of the researchers at the symposium were there to study the permafrost which is thawing because of human-made climate change; when the permafrost thaws, the land under the structures that have been built on it sinks. Miller-Hooks described the situation as the base falling out from under them and said that they need to find solutions now, not tomorrow. With very limited access to materials, finding a solution is especially challenging.

Miller-Hooks’ research focuses on forecasting and modeling shipping and maritime transportation changes that will come as the permafrost thaws and the sea-level rises. She said she doesn’t get out in the field much in her line of work but found the experience life changing.

“What I learned from the community and tribal leaders was invaluable. I learned that they really want co-production. They want to be heard. They want us to understand what they know and bring it into our research. We must not ignore their experience and try to push research findings on them, but instead, learn together and jointly develop solutions.”

This idea crystalized after Miller-Hooks presented her research at the symposium. After her presentation, one of the village leaders expressed concern and skepticism about the math.

He said he thought she was looking at the wrong thing. He told her that more shipping in the Arctic would harm the whales and could harm whaling.

Miller-Hooks explained that her research creates the tools that can help forecast changing Arctic traffic, and how these projections and analyses can be used to help make cases to mitigate the impact on the whales and their breeding, other marine life, whale hunting, and indigenous people’s subsistence way of life.

“Now I have a much better understanding of the power of the results that we will get, and how they can be used from many new angles that I hadn't thought of,” she said. Miller-Hooks hopes to collaborate with the communities and work with them to uncover how increased maritime traffic and related industrial activity in the region will impact their way of life, and how the U.S. and other Arctic nations can prepare to do the right thing.

Research Sponsors: Funding for the symposium came from the NSF Arctic Sciences program, the U.S. Department of Transportation's Center for Safety Equity in Transportation, and UIC Science, a subsidiary of the Ukpeaġvik Iñupiat Corporation providing logistical support to scientists and researchers working in Alaska's Arctic.

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Climate change might be fueling ethnic violence. PhD candidate Emily Sample explores why

Mariam Aburdeineh — Fri, 04 Feb 2022 19:49:37 +0000

Climate change might be fueling ethnic violence. PhD candidate Emily Sample explores why Mariam Aburdeineh Fri, 02/04/2022 - 14:49

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Douglas Irvin-Erickson

Emily Sample. Photo by Shelby Burgess/Strategic Communications/��AV

As a junior and senior at Annandale High School in Virginia, Emily Sample spent her summers as a docent at the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. She was a teenager who had just lost a friend to police violence, she said, and joining the museum’s Young Ambassadors Program resonated with her.

“I was fascinated and continue to be fascinated by this highly illogical idea of genocide,” said Sample, a PhD candidate at ��AV’s Carter School for Peace and Conflict Resolution.

Since then, Sample has built her career around atrocity prevention. In addition to earning a master’s in human rights and genocide studies from Kingston University London, she has worked as a genocide scholar and educator for Holocaust Museum Houston in Texas. She currently works for the Fund for Peace, where she said she supports their portfolio on human rights and international peacebuilding.

“The best way to prevent genocide is to help make violence not an option,” Sample said, explaining that an “us-versus-them” mentality can develop when people believe there is scarcity of resources, and are manipulated into thinking ethnic violence is an answer.

She’s further studying this at Mason, with a case study in West Nile, Uganda, where she lived and conducted research while enrolled at Kingston. Her dissertation examines structural mass atrocity prevention through the lens of climate change adaptation and gender.

Emily Sample (right) and her research partner Lina Zedriga in Uganda in 2013. Photo provided.

“If we make the climate better, if we empower women and have better access to clean water, then [Ugandans] will not be forced into making decisions about whether or not their family lives and the next family dies,” said Sample, who is interviewing Ugandans over Zoom.

Sample is also looking at the effects of environmental racism, where negative environmental impacts disproportionately affect people of color.

“The day-to-day life of someone in Uganda may be much more impacted [by climate change than a Westerner’s] because they’re having to adjust their farming season, and the type of seeds and livestock they’re buying,” she said.

These impacts have gendered implications, Sample said, as women often tend the gardens, cook, and walk to retrieve water.

Increasing education and environmental justice, such as reparations for environmental racism, while reducing scarcity fears, could alleviate many atrocity issues, she said.

Sample said she came to Mason because she wanted to dive deeper into the genocide prevention field.

“My hometown university has one of the best [conflict resolution] programs in the country,” said Sample, who also works with Mason’s Raphaël Lemkin Genocide Prevention Program.

“The Carter School is extremely unique in how many scholar-practitioners we have,” she said. “They integrate students into their work in unique and really pivotal ways that allow students to become practitioners.”

Though the PhD journey is demanding, Sample said her studies have been worthwhile.

“Every single professor is approachable, interesting and has contributed to me seeing the world in a variety of different ways,” she said.

“Emily is a rising star in genocide studies and conflict resolution, and the nexus of these fields with the practice of peacebuilding,” said Douglas Irvin-Erickson, director of Mason’s Genocide Prevention Program. “She’s a brilliant social analyst with many years of ethnographically informed research experience, and her deeply rooted sense of justice endears her to those with whom she works the closest.”

Due to the Covid-19 pandemic, Sample conducts interviews for her dissertation virtually. Here, two Ugandan men communicate with her from Africa via Zoom using a smartphone (bottom right). Photo provided.

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Mason researchers study the complicated and cascading effects of Arctic ice melt

Martha Bushong — Sat, 22 Feb 2020 14:08:37 +0000

Mason researchers study the complicated and cascading effects of Arctic ice melt Martha Bushong Sat, 02/22/2020 - 09:08

The Arctic is warming at more than twice the rate of the rest of the planet, but for a team of researchers at ��AV that’s just the tip of the iceberg of the changes to come.

The team members, led by faculty from Mason’s Volgenau School of Engineering and the School for Conflict Analysis and Resolution, are diving into how melting ice in the Arctic will affect the people, habitats, and social fabric of this remote region.

The National Science Foundation grant, “An Expanding Global Maritime Network, Its Arctic Impacts and Reverberations,” provides the resources, time, and support to better understand this global challenge and to help mitigate its effects on the Arctic.

“Our project is not about whether climate change is real,” says Elise Miller-Hooks, professor, the principal investigator, and Bill and Eleanor Hazel Chair of Infrastructure Engineering at the Volgenau School. “We are considering the effects of the sea ice melting in the Arctic and the potential for this change to affect world trade flows and a myriad of things that connect to these flows.”

As previously ice-bound passageways open, shorter trade routes will save time and money in the transport of goods and services. Some call this route the new Northwest passage, referencing the path to China that explorers from European nation-states of the 15th century sought but never found.

“The opening up of this northwest route will affect trade in many ways,” says Miller-Hooks. “It will affect large nations and local economies. It will affect wildlife and the environment. It will affect transportation and infrastructure.”

As more traffic passes through the Arctic, the people who live there will experience both positive and negative effects. There will be changes in supply chains, increased pollution of the shipping lanes, and changes to the fragile arctic ecosystem. On the other hand, there will be jobs and the potential for economic growth, but these opportunities could disrupt the lives of indigenous people and threaten the survival of their cultures.

Sara Cobb, the grant’s co-principal investigator and director of the Center for the Study of Narrative and Conflict Resolution says, “The Arctic is sort of the canary in the coal mine.” Cobb brings her expertise in conflict and narrative studies as the team seeks to understand the impact of the coming changes and develop early warning systems for arctic communities.

“Those of us in the social sciences are good at qualitative work,” says Cobb, Drucie French Cumbie professor at Mason’s School for Conflict Analysis and Resolution. “Now the modeling work is so advanced that we need experts in that field.”

“The Arctic ice melt is a big problem. Big problems demand big answers and big teams. We are leading a team of experts from many different areas, including civil engineering, applied mathematics, anthropology, ice physics, coastal dynamics, and narrative approaches to conflict analysis and resolution.”

Elise Miller-Hooks

The study’s unique pairing of mathematical analysis with narrative studies aims to help develop tools that could lead to early responses to help mitigate the effects of the many changes in the Arctic.

Celso Ferreira associate professor in the Sid and Reva Dewberry Department of Civil, Environmental, and Infrastructure Engineering and a co-principal investigator on the grant, adds his knowledge of flood hazards to the team.

As it turns out, sea ice in the Arctic protects coastlines from erosion like the marshes and wetlands protect the Chesapeake Bay that he studies. “As the Arctic ice diminishes the coastlines are more vulnerable to storms and erosion,” says Ferreira. The team hopes to be co-producers of knowledge with the people who live in these areas as they develop sustainable solutions to the challenges of the ice melt.

“The Arctic ice melt is a big problem. Big problems demand big answers and big teams,” says Miller-Hooks. “We are leading a team of experts from many different areas, including civil engineering, applied mathematics, anthropology, ice physics, coastal dynamics, and narrative approaches to conflict analysis and resolution.”

Mason researchers will study the effects of Arctic ice melt in a five-year multidisciplinary grant funded by the National Science Foundation. The study blends quantitative and qualitative methods to provide a more complete understanding of the effects of melting ice on the people of the region. (Stock photo).

Ultimately the research team wants to develop a toolbox that will support research around the globe with Mason researchers at the center of the work. The toolbox will include mathematical techniques for modeling how the goods will be rerouted under different scenarios. It will also consider the risks associated with the new trade routes made possible by the melting ice.

The researchers will seek to understand the coastal dynamics, consider how to best build on the melting permafrost, investigate how to plan for emergencies when the ice breaks apart, and look at the cultural impacts.

Miller-Hooks says the team’s work has opened her eyes to the interconnectedness of our world. Although she has traveled around the globe, she never thought she would visit the Arctic—it seemed so distant and remote. “I realize now that we are all in this together. What happens in Nuuk, Greenland or Barrow, Alaska affects us all.”