Arctic Pores

The Arctic is a complex environment, with porous media forming parts of the lithosphere, cryosphere, hydrosphere, and biosphere. In this talk, Malgorzata Peszynska, University Distinguished Professor of Mathematics at Oregon State University (2022–25), will present her work on the mathematical and computational modeling of energy and mass transport phenomena, as well as mechanical deformation in Arctic soils. These processes are coupled with atmospheric phenomena controlled by the Earth’s climate and weather.

Webinar Details

This webinar will take place today, starting at 16:00, and will run for 1 hour.

What Will You Learn?

In this webinar, we will begin by exploring heat conduction and water flow involving the ice/water phase transitions in permafrost soils coupled to the processes in the snow cover. While many aspects have been well studied by geophysicists using Darcy scale models based on empirical data, our approach works in silicio, aiming to find explanations and interpretations for these models starting at the pore scale and scaling up.

We will also outline the principles of robust and efficient computational algorithms for simulations from the pore- to the Darcy scales. Finally, we will illustrate how these efforts can be used to build more and better models, which is also important for applications beyond the Arctic, such as in biological tissue and extraterrestrial materials.

This work represents a joint effort with an incredible team of students and collaborators, who will be duly acknowledged in the presentation.