Climate Shifts Have Engineers Rethinking the Baseline of Planning
Nowhere is this understood better than in the Arctic, where ice packs that have long protected shoreside villages from storms are withdrawing, and where the permafrost that bears the loads of columns, beams and roadbeds is threatened by the change of a single temperature degree.
“We are on the phase-change line for global climate change,” says Duane Miller, a geotechnical engineer and principal of Duane Miller Associates LLC, Fairbanks, Alaska. “Alaska is the canary in the weather system.”