How Vulnerable Is Alaska’s Transportation to Climate Change? Managing an Infrastructure Built on Permafrost
Climate change is affecting transportation systems across the country, and scientists and policymakers are working to clarify the trends. Alaska’s transportation community, however, has direct experience to verify the impacts of climate change. Geography and extreme climate have made the state a kin...
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| Format: | Text |
| Language: | English |
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| Online Access: | http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.393.9470 http://onlinepubs.trb.org/onlinepubs/trnews/trnews284Alaska.pdf |
| Summary: | Climate change is affecting transportation systems across the country, and scientists and policymakers are working to clarify the trends. Alaska’s transportation community, however, has direct experience to verify the impacts of climate change. Geography and extreme climate have made the state a kind of climate-change classroom for the rest of the nation in predicting the effects on transportation infrastructure. The wear and tear of climate change on Alaska’s transportation systems is evident. The state has more than 6,600 miles of coastline, and approximately 80 percent of the land mass has an underlayer of ice-rich permafrost. Alaska has 17 of the nation’s 20 largest mountain ranges and experiences extremes in precipitation, snowfall, and temperature swings that are unique to the arctic and northern latitudes. With warming permafrost, coastal erosion, and increasingly dramatic storms and flood events, Alaska’s highways, runways, and other infrastructure are frequently icing, cracking, and washing away. Although these adversities challenge all of the state’s major transportation systems—maritime, aviation, and surface—the most acute and costly damage occurs within the road system. Climate change in Alaska is forcing engineers and planners to adapt both to warming and to cooling trends. Engineers and planners are addressing knowledge gaps in thermal and hydrological dynamics and are translating the findings into new and more robust designs. (Right:) Differential settlement on an abandoned section of the Richardson Highway, south of Fairbanks, one year after maintenance ceased. |
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