I just spent four days at a workshop in Northern Iceland. The meeting was based at the secretariat of the International Arctic Science Committee (IASC; acronym #1) in Akureyri. Turns out Akureyri is spookily like a smaller Tromso! I’ll get to the reason that I was there in a bit - but at the very root is being an IASC fellow this year. If you want to know a more about that, you can read my blog post about the Arctic Science Summit Week (ASSW, acronym #2) in Scotland.
As part of my IASC fellowship I wandered into the world of ICARP: the International Conference on Arctic Research Planning (acronym #3). ICARP is more than a research conference where you show up and stand next to a poster looking dorky. It’s a decade-long process where Arctic scientists get together and figure out what we need to know about the Arctic, and how we’re going to find it out. The fourth iteration of ICARP has its summit in Boulder Colorado next year, and I’ll be attending with my IASC fellow hat on, but also my cochair hat for one of ICARP’s seven Research Priority Teams (RPTs; acronym #4).
Having had our first meeting in Edinburgh in March of this year, all my RPT-related work has been remote. That changed with this meeting, where co-chairs of the RPTs were invited to come to Akureyri and thrash out some details. Being in the zoom is good, but being in the room is better. While communication within individual research priority teams has generally been good, communication between RPTs has been less effective. So we all showed up to discuss the overlaps between our respective teams’ remits, gaps between the remits, procedural issues, and how we’re actually going to report our findings. It was also a great chance for RPT cochairs to chat with the ICARP steering committee, which plays a big role in synthesising the final ICARP report from the individual reports by the RPTs.
I felt like we made progress on the above technical issues, but more importantly I left Iceland with a much greater large-scale understanding of the ICARP process. Just selfishly, the meeting was also a great networking opportunity for me: there are a lot of senior scientists involved and it was useful to chat with them in an informal setting; there’s also a strong contingent of ECRs who are generally a fascinating bunch. Even more selfishly, I had a great time hanging out with everyone in the evenings! I came back super motivated.
Above: Talking shop in a geothermally heated hot-tub with Kabir Raouli (2022 IASC fellow), standing in a rock arch (both taken by Lisa Winberg von Friesen - 2023 fellow). Final photo is of a geothermal area we visited on the final afternoon.
IASC paid for me to attend this meeting - flights, hotel, per diem. After ASSW in Boulder I’ll no longer receive this level of funding support, so I’m very grateful to have it while it lasts! I view these IASC/ICARP activities as deep, slow-payoff, long-term investments in my academic future. Sometimes it feels like investing like that is a gamble: shouldn’t I just be writing code and churning out loads of papers? Perhaps - but I really like the IASC/ICARP stuff, and it truly refreshes my analytical brain to discuss these big-picture topics.