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Dear Friends of the IPA and fellow permafrost enthusiasts, The third PAST Gateways International Conference and Workshop 2015, co-sponsored by the IPA will be held in Potsdam, Germany, on May 18-22, 2015. http:/www.awi.de/pastgateways2015 PAST Gateways (Past Spatial and Temporal Gateways) is an IASC-endorsed network, with the scientific goal to understand and reconstruct Arctic environmental changes, during the period preceding instrumental records and across decadal to millennial timescales. The focus…

Dear Friends of the IPA and fellow permafrost enthusiasts, The Country Reports of 2014 can be found at http://ipa.arcticportal.org/publications/country-reports.html. We would like to thank all of you, who contributed to this issue!

Professor Emeritus J. Ross Mackay (University of British Columbia, Canada) passed away peacefully on October 28, 2014, just short of the start of his 100th year. He was a seminal figure in geocryology and his publications will undoubtedly remain critical to permafrost science for many decades to come. He was among the most prominent and one of the last living representatives of the early international researchers in the field, such as Roger Brown, Arturo Corte, Alfred Jahn, Pavel Melnikov, Siemon Mulle…

Arctic Change 2014 Conference took place last week, 8 – 12 of December in Ottawa, capital city of Canada.Climate change and Arctic issues, including the health of Northerners, melting sea-ice, intercontinental shipping, resource exploration, and the expansion of national jurisdictions, are moving to the top of national and international agendas. Circumpolar nations face an increased urgency to expand the observational basis needed to formulate strategies and policies that will minimize the negative i…

Dear Cryosol community,Please find here a link to a cryosol calendar to celebrate the international year of soils. Feel free to download and print copies for yourself and friends. This calendar is provided by Dr. Megan Balks (IPA Representative New Zealand).Her special thanks goes to all those who contributed the stunning photos for the calendar and to graphic artist Marianne Coleman who helped her to collate them into the beautiful calendar. Please respect the photographers – if you want to extract …

From 23 to 26 of October 2014 the Landslide Research Group at the Technische Universität München hosted the 7th annual meeting of the German working group on permafrost (AK Permafrost). The meeting brought together 50 researchers from across Europe (Switzerland, Austria, United Kingdom, Norway, and Germany) to discuss recent research, and the outlook for future change in permafrost-affected polar and alpine environments. The pre-meeting excursion to the Zugspitze (highest mountain of Germany) permafr…

The Permafrost Research Priorities survey for submitting future research questions closed on 20 September. We have received almost 650 questions from more than 300 participants. The IPA and the Climate and Cryosphere Project (CliC) thank the community for this great response to the project. The PRP core group will now review the submitted questions to assure they meet the criteria by Sutherland et al. (2011) outlined at the beginning of the project, discard questions that do not meet the criteria, merg…

The IPA is pleased to introduce a new call for funded Action Groups in 2014. Action Groups are an element in the IPA structure and are meant to fund targeted groups working towards the production of well-defined products. Action Groups will be funded on a competitive basis at up to 2500 € per year (maximum of 5000 € over the life of an Action Group). Up to 10 000 € per year of the IPA total budget will be devoted to Action Groups. These groups will have limited terms and will need to focus on cle…

The IPA President, Antoni Lewkowicz, was in the field with his graduate students this past summer at both ends of Canada: in Labrador, on the Atlantic coast, and in the Yukon, close to Canada’s western boundary with Alaska. At Cartwright (54°N) in Labrador, the isolated patches of permafrost are useful to the local inhabitants. They park sleds to be towed behind snowmobiles on top of palsas so that they are easily accessible and not covered in deep snow in the winter. In Nain (57°N), ERT surveys sh…