Observing the Human North
Circumpolar Observatory
The HfE Circumpolar Observatory is a distributed network connecting researchers, communities, and knowledge across the Arctic and Subarctic. Based at the Stefansson Arctic Institute in Akureyri, Iceland, the Observatory explores the diverse environmental, cultural, economic, and geopolitical realities that shape life throughout the Circumpolar North. By bringing together perspectives from across this vast region, we seek to better understand both its shared challenges and its remarkable diversity.
Our Mission
Understanding Change in the Arctic and Subarctic
Exceptionally early ice melt, Greenland. Images taken by the Advanced Land Imager onboard the Earth Observing-1 satellite and the Operational Land Imager onboard Landsat 8. Source: NASA Earth Observatory.
Global Research Networks
Circumpolar Observatory Research Projects
The research and educational projects promoted by the HfE Circumpolar Observatory aim to increase scientific and scholarly understanding of how human communities have responded in the past to extreme environmental events and variability, while also working to better understand these challenges as they unfold in the present, so that a fuller archive of knowledge can be mobilized for the benefit of human and non-human communities in the future.
The researchers, projects and educational programs brought together in the observatory are defined, in part, by an openness to disciplinary border crossing that aligns physical environmental studies with historical and cultural modes of inquiry.
The 100-Year Time-Lapse Project
ICECHANGE
North Atlantic Marine Mammal Project
Bifrost Online
Observatory Affiliates
Community members, researchers and scholars.
Robert Boschman
Robert Boschman is a professor in the Department of English, Languages, and Cultures at Mount Royal University in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. He is co-founder of the award-winning Under Western Skies biennial conference series on the environment held at Mount Royal from 2010 to 2016. A past president of the Association for Literature, Environment, and Culture in Canada, Dr. Boschman specializes in ecological approaches to teaching American literature, with emphasis on the seventeenth and twentieth centuries. His monograph, In the Way of Nature: Ecology and Westward Movement in the Poetry of Anne Bradstreet, Elizabeth Bishop and Amy Clampitt, was published in 2009, and has been reviewed in journals internationally, including Anglia: A Journal of English Philology, ISLE, University of Toronto Quarterly, Choice, and The Goose. Found in Alberta: Environmental Themes for the Anthropocene (co-edited with Mario Trono) was published in 2014 by Wilfrid Laurier University Press; and On Active Grounds: Agency and Time in the Environmental Humanities will be published by WLUP in 2018. Boschman’s book about growing up in northern Saskatchewan, The Ride Along: A Memoir of Place, Family, and Intergenerational Trauma, is forthcoming from the University of Regina Press. He also collaborates with Bill Bunn in documenting the abandoned mining town of Uranium City on the north of Lake Athabasca–their co-authored, open-access article, “Nuclear Avenue: ‘Cyclonic Development’, Abandonment, and Relations in Uranium City, Canada” was published in Humanities in January 2018. Boschman’s work in environmental still photography can be viewed at robertboschman.com.
Gísli Pálsson
Gísli Pálsson is a landscape archaeologist based in Sweden. His expertise is in geographical information science, archaeoinformatics and remote sensing. He is currently researching the role of resource exchange networks on land use in Medieval and early modern Iceland. His project, Storied Lines: tracing the tendrils of agency across Iceland’s historic landscape can be found at http://jardabok.com.
Dag Avango
Dag Avango, PhD in History of Technology, is a researcher at KTH-Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden. In his research, he has primarily dealt with the relationship between resource extraction, science and (geo)politics in the polar regions from a long term historical perspective. A related field of research is on legacies of industry and how communities deal with such legacies when building post-industrial futures, through remediation and heritage processes.
Dag Avango’s research is situated at the interface between archaeology and history, based on the theoretical assumption that material objects and environments play an active role in society and therefore should be considered in explanations of historical change, and following this the methodological approach of combining archival studies with archaeological fieldwork. Dag Avango has published widely and also run graduate and post-graduate education on those topics.
Dag Avango is the XO of the Nordic Centre of Excellence REXSAC – Resource Extraction and Sustainable Arctic Communities (www.rexsac.com). He also leads research projects under the umbrella of REXSAC, entitled Mining heritage as a resource for sustainable communities (https://www.kth.se/profile/avango/page/mining-heritage-as-a-resource-for-sustainable-communities) and is involved in a project exploring heritage processes in Antarctica. For more information on publications and research projects of Dag Avango, see https://dagavango.com/
Thomas H McGovern
Thomas H McGovern is an environmental archaeologist working in the North Atlantic. He is a Professor in the Anthropology Program at the City University of New York Graduate Center and directs the Hunter College Zooarchaeology Laboratory. He serves as the coordinator of the international North Atlantic Biocultural Organization (NABO) research and education cooperative, and serves on the Integrated History and Future of People on Earth (IHOPE) science steering committee and the IHOPE Circumpolar Networks and Threats to Heritage and the Distributed Observing Networks of the Past initiatives. He is active in the Society for American Archaeology’s Climate Change Strategies and the Archaeological Record Committee and the European Archaeological Association’s Climate Change Task Force.
Philip Buckland
Philip Buckland is an associate professor of environmental archaeology at the Department of Historical, Philosophical and Religious Studies at Umeå University, Sweden. With a PhD in environmental archaeology (2007), he is director of the Environmental Archaeology Lab infrastructure for research, consultancy and methods development. His research includes long-term changes in climate and environment, human impact on the landscape, and the interpretation of archaeological sites using fossil insect remains. He continues to maintain and develop the Bugs Coleaopteran Ecology Package, a research and teaching system for palaeoecology and ecology which has been active since the mid 1980s, and received an honourable mention at the 2015 international data rescue awards in the geosciences. Phil is also active in the Scandinavian archaeological consultancy sector and maintains cross-sector links with Swedish government administrations involved in cultural heritage impacts and management. Phil is director of the Strategic Environmental Archaeology Database, a research data infrastructure for studying a broad range of aspects of past environments. The database includes data ranging from the individual counts of plant macrofossils from archaeological samples and geochemical measurements of soils, sediments and ceramics to modern ecological and climate reference data. He is also a member of the leadership council for the Neotoma Paleoecology Database and Community, and a partner in the Swedish Lifewatch Consortium for biodiversity studies. Phil is involved in the development, application and study of these and other digital infrastructures, with a particular focus on linking ecology and biodiversity research to the humanities. Phil is a Co-PI of the NSF funded DataARC, a massively interdisciplinary project developing tools to link datasets from archaeology, paleoecology, climate science, history, and literature. He teaches a number of courses in archaeological theory and methods, including GIS and supervision at undergraduate and postgraduate levels.
Árni Daníel Júlíusson
Árni Daníel Júlíusson is a historian affiliated with the Reykjavík Academy and, since 2017, with the University of Iceland. Árni Daníel´s research interests lie in the complex interaction between the environment, human subsistence and the effects of social stratification. Among these effects can be counted social conflict and the activities of social movements. His field of research is pre-industrial peasant farming society, primarily in Iceland. Árni Daníel studied at the University of Iceland and, from 1988, contributed to a major publishing project, the Icelandic Historical Atlas (3 vols., 1989-1993). He then initiated his Ph.D. studies, graduating from the University of Copenhagen in 1997 with a Ph.D. thesis titled „Bønder i pestens tid “, or “Peasants in the time of the Plague”, which was an analysis of Icelandic peasant farmer society 1300-1700. From 1997 Árni Daníel was active in the establishment of the Reykjavík Academy, a collective of independent scholars of the arts and humanities in Reykjavík, and has been an active member ever since. In 2005 he began work with others on the Agricultural History of Iceland, which appeared in four vols. 2013. Árni Daníel wrote vols. 1 and 2. Árni Daníel is active in several research projects concerning environmental history, including the international transdisciplinary research project Reflections of Change: The Natural World in Literary and Historical Sources from Iceland ca. AD 800 to 1800 (2017-2020) funded by The Swedish Foundation for Humanities and Social Sciences. His latest publication is Miðaldir í skuggsjá Svarfaðardals, a book which deals with the medieval history of Svarfaðardalur with an interdisciplinary methodology, using archaeology, environmental history and conventional historical sources to paint a nuanced picture of the history of this region 800-1500 AD.