Funding Source: Canada

Problem: One of the biggest burgeoning climate threats today is thawing permafrost. Mainly found in polar regions like the Canadian Arctic, permafrost is composed of ice, rock and sediment located under a layer of soil. As much as 70 percent of permafrost could melt by 2100, releasing massive amounts of carbon into the atmosphere.
Climate change-induced permafrost thaw also causes landslides and erosion that threaten communities and critical infrastructure. The problem statement aims at providing a solution to detect these permafrost regions in the Arctic region
Solution: Start-up 3vGeomatics is using a remote sensing radar satellite-based technology called InSAR to monitor thawing permafrost across the Canadian Arctic.

Conducting analyses via an on-premises server with NVIDIA data centre GPUs enables thousand-fold increase in processing speed of the radar satellite images, each of which contains billions of pixels and covers thousands of square kilometers. Through InSAR monitoring of built structures, it is possible to identify movement in specific parts of a building as well as specific areas within a network of buildings across a property.