i. Abstract

Abstract

Covering 22.8 million km2, permafrost connects the landscape of the Arctic through its fluid, messy, and complex assemblage of organic and inorganic materials. This so-called permanently frozen ground goes through numerous cycles throughout the year, creating unique landscape conditions both above and below ground. As climate change is set to increase ground temperature and precipitation in the Arctic, these dynamic conditions will expand as well, thus awakening this sub-surface permafrost and the dynamic material assemblages present within. Consequentially, landscape architects will need to embrace the fluidity and agency of the underground to respectfully design for these variable conditions set to increase.

As an island in the high-Arctic, Svalbard is covered in a layer of continuous permafrost which runs as deep as 500m below the surface. This landscape thus presents itself as a nexus of engagement with sub-surface permafrost through its coal mines, monitoring boreholes, seed vault, and foundations. To understand and develop a landscape architectural vocabulary for the Arctic’s fluid, frozen ground, this diploma will design a lexicon of Longyearbyen’s temporalmaterial underground permafrost conditions through drawings, animations, and models. This expanded literacy of the underground will then be applied to a landscape architectural design proposal for the after-life of the soon to be decommissioned Mine #7.

This proposal imagines how specific design interventions within and above the mine, might encourage/reveal permafrosts increasingly fluid state as climate change alters landscape conditions above and below ground. The design’s intention is to prioritize more-than-human processes and beings, while also developing ways to reveal the realities and temporalities of underground permafrost within the coal mine to human visitors. In this way, this work will propose a method for how to plan, remediate, engage with and address the Arctic’s frozen ground, through landscape architecture.

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