More than half of Earth's rivers are covered by ice during winters, but climate change will cause declining ice cover. Rivers within this region, e.g. in Finland, Sweden and Norway, are crucial study sites for understanding the environmental changes on fluvial systems. Critical knowledge gaps remain for ice processes, and river ice, flow characteristics and sediment transport interactions are “a big unknown” in fluvial studies. These gaps will be overcame in CRIce project, as the overall aim is to create new space-time theories of the interacting river ice, flow characteristics and sediment transport under changing environmental conditions in boreal-polar region, via measuring, experimenting and modelling them. For the first time, (cryo-)laboratory experiments (with real and proxy ice: at Aalto Ice and Wave Tank and Environmental Hydraulics Laboratory) are integrated to field measurements, and future hydro-morphodynamics are simulated using newly developed sediment transport equations.

2025

2029