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Permafrost and Related Ground Ice Terms, National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC)
Multi-Language Glossary Available Online

The glossary is available at: http://nsidc.org/fgdc/glossary/

During the 5th International Permafrost Conference, held in Trondheim (Norway) in August 1988, the Council of the International Permafrost Association (IPA) authorized the establishment of a Terminology Working Group with the mandate "to develop a set of internationally accepted permafrost terms for use in engineering and science, with equivalents in various languages, and to disseminate and encourage the use of such terminology." The Terminology Working Group included members from Argentina, Canada, China, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, Norway, Sweden, the USA, and the (former) USSR, and they published a hard copy version of the Glossary in 1998. The glossary, edited by Robert O. van Everdingen, included detailed illustrations and terms in Chinese, English, French, German, Icelandic, Italian, Norwegian, Polish, Romanian, Russian, Spanish and Swedish.

Electronic versions of the English version of the 1998 Glossary without illustrations was published on the Circumpolar Active-layer Permafrost System (CAPS) CD-ROMs (versions 1.0 and 2.0), but until now the illustrations and multi-language terms were only available in the limited paper publication. Now, thanks to the continued work of Dr. van Everdingen, the full, illustrated, multi-language version of the glossary is available at: http://nsidc.org/fgdc/glossary/

The references and English definitions are available in HTML and PDF formats. The introduction, illustrations, and multi-language terms are available in PDF format.

Please contact NSIDC User Services with any questions:
CIRES, 449 UCB
University of Colorado
Boulder, CO 80309-0449
USA
Phone: 303-492-6199
Fax: 303-492-2468
E-mail: nsidc@nsidc.org
URL: http://nsidc.org