Events

A Multi-Disciplinary Arctic Sea Ice Workshop

Thursday 19^th February 2026
Craig Suite, Sir Duncan Rice Library & Online

9.00-9.30 - Coffee

9.30-9.45 – Welcome & Introductions - Isabelle Gapp & Sarah Cooley

9.45 – 11.00 – Session 1: Sea Ice Remote Sensing

• Alice Bradley (Williams College) - Making remote sensing relevant: using ICESat-2 to find grounded ridges in coastal sea ice
• Charles Brunette (University of Ottawa) – What do we see when a satellite goes dark?
• Sarah Cooley (Duke University) – Landfast ice at the community-scale: 20+ years of ice dynamics in 66 communities across Alaska, Canada, and Greenland
• Johnny Ryan (Duke University) – More pixels, more insights? The potential of very high resolution satellite data for sea ice monitoring

11.00-11.15 – Break

11.15-12.30 – Session 2: Perspectives on Sea Ice Monitoring

• Emma Rath (Laurentian University) - We Build to Break: Tracing Icebreaking through the Canadian Coast Guard Photography Archive
• Isabelle Gapp (University of Aberdeen) – Looking Under: Drawing Below the Sea Ice in Kinngait, Nunavut
• Jacob Seston (University of Aberdeen) - Reducing Annotation Bottlenecks in Arctic Sea-Ice Monitoring
• Ilia Nicoll (Arctic Eider Society) - Sharing Inuit sea ice terminology through SIKU: The Indigenous Knowledge App

12.30-1.30 – Lunch

1.30-3.00 – Session 3: Sea Ice and Society

• Breanna Bishop (McMaster University) – Co-developing a conceptual model rooted in Inuit Knowledge of the landfast sea ice season near Makkovik, Nunatsiavut
• Seira Duncan (Indo-Pacific Studies Center) - Indigeneity and drift ice in the Sea of Okhotsk
• Doria De Souza Etchells (University of Edinburgh) - Society and how it responds to climate change: Perspective from Greenland over the last 2,000 years
• Christopher Heuer (University of Rochester) – Greenlandic Ice as Counter-Monument: The Art of the Disappeared
• Mia Bennett (University of Washington) - If the Ice Came Back: Geoengineering and its Discontents

3.00-3.15 – Break

3.15-4.30 – Session 4: Sea Ice Interactions

• Benjamin Richaud (UCLouvain) - Knitting physical and biogeochemical interactions in sea ice
• Laura Crews (University of Alaska Fairbanks) - Oceanographic Influences on Nearshore and Landfast Sea Ice
• Anna Crawford (University of Stirling) – The influence of sea ice on the proliferation of Arctic "ice islands"  
• Patricia De Repentigny (University of Ottawa) - Reframing the Arctic: An interdisciplinary and multi-scalar perspective on the divergence of boundaries and risk change in the Anthropocene

4.30-4.45 – Closing Remarks

Understanding sea ice change around the Arctic and its impacts requires thinking beyond and across traditional disciplinary boundaries. While research into the physical science of sea ice often receives most of the attention, sea ice research is equally pervasive within the social sciences and humanities, e.g. anthropological studies of the role of sea ice in northern and Indigenous communities, economic and geopolitical analyses of the impact of sea ice loss, or arts and humanities investigations into how sea ice is depicted by Indigenous and non-Indigenous makers and within visual, material, and literary cultures. Moreover, Indigenous knowledge, creativity, and relationships to the land further disrupt disciplinary silos and indicate important local sites of experience. Engaging these diverse approaches presents an opportunity to improve our understanding of sea ice as a human and natural system and encourage cross-disciplinary and community collaboration.

We are calling for participants for a two-day workshop on multi-disciplinary sea ice research and knowledge to be held at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland, on February 19-20, 2026. Our aim is to bring together researchers and practitioners working on or living with sea ice, and who come from a variety of academic career stages and perspectives, including physical science (e.g. remote sensing, climate modeling), social science (e.g. anthropology, sociology, geography), the arts and humanities (e.g. creative practice, art history, environmental history). 

The goals of this workshop are twofold. First, it will provide a space for researchers, knowledge holders, and practitioners to share and disseminate current research on and experiences of Arctic sea ice encompassing a wide variety of perspectives. Second, we hope to leverage the broad backgrounds of participants to co-produce a review paper focused on multi-disciplinary ways of researching sea ice, integrating the arts, humanities, social sciences, and physical sciences. The workshop itself will consist of a one day symposium made up of presentations, followed by a one day paper writing workshop where we will together brainstorm and plan the paper. We welcome anyone who is interested in engaging with multi-disciplinary sea ice research; participants do not necessarily already need to be conducting interdisciplinary sea ice research.

If interested in applying, please submit a ~150 work abstract along with a brief biography by September 15, 2025 to the following form: https://forms.cloud.microsoft/e/3yPpHMCzwp 

Travel funds are available to support workshop participants, but please indicate on the form if you have any additional funds that you could use to support your participation.

This event is funded by From the Floe Edge: Visualising Sea Ice Change in Kinngait, Nunavut, a British Academy Knowledge Frontiers International Interdisciplinary Research Project award to I. Gapp (University of Aberdeen), S. Cooley (Duke University), and the West-Baffin Co-operative.

Any questions should be directed to the organizers at: isabelle.gapp@abdn.ac.uk and/or sarah.cooley@duke.edu