Saline permafrost is emerging as a key but often overlooked driver of environmental change in cold regions. This session explores its distribution, processes, and implications for landscapes, infrastructure, and Earth system dynamics. Extensive areas are underlain by saline permafrost, where dissolved salts depress the freezing point, allow ground to remain partially or completely unfrozen below 0 °C, and modify the physical properties of frozen ground. These conditions can accelerate thaw, deepen thermokarst lakes, destabilize infrastructure, and influence coastal and biogeochemical processes.

Saline permafrost occurs in Arctic, Antarctic, and high-elevation regions, yet remains poorly mapped and inconsistently defined. This session invites contributions on distribution and detection, including field geophysics and remote sensing, coupled thermal and hydrological processes, laboratory experiments, infrastructure and coastal impacts, biogeochemical dynamics, and efforts to standardize definitions and datasets to advance interdisciplinary understanding and foster international collaboration.

• B - Biogeosciences
• EP - Earth and Planetary Surface Processes
• GC - Global Environmental Change
• NS - Near Surface Geophysics