Glossary of permafrost science and engineering / Глоссарий по науке и технике о вечной мерзлоте

The Glossary of Permafrost Science and Engineering is a wholesale revision of the Glossary of Permafrost and Related Ground-Ice Terms (Harris et al., 1988) and the International Permafrost Association’s Multilanguage Glossary of Permafrost and Related Ground-Ice Terms (van Everdingen, 2005). The new title was chosen to better identify its content and to reflect the extent of the revisions.
The 1988 version of the Glossary was compiled by a working group of the Permafrost Subcommittee of the Associate Committee on Geotechnical Research of the National Research Council of Canada. The members were Stuart A. Harris (Chair), Hugh M. French, J. Alan Heginbottom, G. Hank Johnston, Branko Ladanyi, Dave C. Sego and Robert O. van Everdingen. This first edition was based in part on a previously published booklet entitled Permafrost Terminology (Brown and Kupsch, 1974). The working group met for three years to arrive at the published version, which also appeared in a French translation. The Introduction acknowledged the help of a further 17 individuals who provided feedback on the list of terms, their definitions and the references cited.The list of entries and their definitions in the 1988 Glossary was subsequently revised by the Terminology Working Group of the International Permafrost Association and was translated into multiple languages. It appeared as the Multilanguage Glossary of Permafrost and Related Ground-Ice Terms (van Everdingen, 2005).
The current publication was developed by the Permafrost Terminology Action Group (PTAG) of the Canadian Permafrost Association. The Action Group members, working by consensus and composed of volunteer researchers and practitioners at all career stages, met more than 50 times over four years (2021–2025) to completely revise and update the Glossary. The process (Appendix A) involved identifying and adding 65 new terms adopted by the discipline over the past several decades and modifying the existing entries (term titles, definitions, comments and references) to clarify or update them. In addition, a hierarchy of entries was developed, to assist with discoverability. The process resulted in the elimination of 108 of the 398 entries in the 2005 version because the terms (1) could be included as sub-categories within another entry, (2) have fallen into desuetude, (3) are general scientific or engineering terms that do not relate strongly or exclusively to permafrost, or (4) were judged to be descriptive phrases rather than true terms. A further 49 new terms were considered for inclusion but ultimately were not chosen to be listed as individual entries. The result is a total of 355 entries, of which 261 are modified from the 2005 Multilanguage Glossary and 29 are unchanged in definition and comment but may include new references. Modifications ranged from one or two-word edits to the definition or comment with no change to the meaning, up to complete reformulation. Appendix B summarizes the origin of each entry.<...>