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Paper short abstract

What does it mean to know a landscape in the final stages of degradation? Taking the case of a long-studied permafrost polygon in the Canadian Arctic, this paper asks how scientific sensing comes to terms with change and degradation in meaningful landscapes.

Paper long abstract

Inuvik, in Canada’s Western Arctic, has been a place of environmental scientific attention since the 1960s. Research on permafrost landscapes happens at sites in the nearby Mackenzie Delta and beyond. One such research site, only a short drive south of town, has been the subject of various projects for decades and hosts a plethora of active and abandoned sensors. Drawing on recent ethnographic fieldwork with researchers in Inuvik, I take the example of this particular permafrost polygon feature to discuss how scientific expertise recons with the change, and more specifically, degradation of a landscape.

In a series of experiments that have been ongoing at this site for decades, the near total degradation of the permafrost has been monitored and experienced by researchers, both as a set of data points and as visible, experienced change in the landscape. As buried thermo-probes and makeshift bridges fashioned from weathered shipping pallets have rendered this site into a sort of field-laboratory (Latour 1999), it also holds the memories of generations of scientists whose accumulated efforts helped make it into the place it is today. In this place, climate catastrophe is made real, both in terms of data (which can be used to model change in other locations) and in the experience of the melting and degrading permafrost.

As the more-than-human entanglement of permafrost, water, sensors, peat, and others melt into something else, what does it mean for environmental scientists to sense, measure, and document this change?