What might seem at a quick glance to be University of Virginia students on a snowy Lawn is actually a group of UVA students bundled up to brave the cold in the United States’ northernmost town, Utqiaġvik, Alaska.
The students are the latest group from UVA’s School of Architecture to contribute to a longstanding research collaboration between the school’s Arctic Design Group and the local communities in Alaska’s North Slope Borough, primarily the Iñupiat, a group of Alaskan natives. Since 2018, UVA architecture professors and Arctic Design Group co-directors Leena Cho and Matthew Jull have led undergraduate and graduate students in collaborative research into community infrastructure and resilience in one of the world’s fastest-warming places, a city that houses more than 4,000 people.
As the air warms and holds more moisture, it is creating more snow and meltwater on the ground. “If you have a place that relied on the ground being frozen regularly and now you were to warm all of the ground, it can get quite mushy,” said Jull, an associate professor of architecture.
Growing up in Hong Kong, Joyce Fong had never experienced anything like the Arctic cold. Now in her final year as a master’s degree candidate in landscape architecture, she is writing a thesis on flood planning.
“Summers are getting longer and winters shorter, so the snow melts faster and leads to more water on the ground,” she said. “First, it will damage and degrade permafrost and the tundra landscape faster and create lots of issues for people living there.”
Before visiting, Fong’s team analyzed data using high-resolution satellite images to understand what the vegetation looked like on the ground. Analyzing a year’s worth of imagery allowed the team to study how snow accumulated and melted in different areas over time.