North-Central Alaska contains soils with ice lenses. If the climate warms in the future as predicted, those ice lenses may melt. If enough ice melts it would cause the soil to collapse. This might harm the trees, lead to soil erosion, or increase the silt in rivers. Currently little is known about the potential amount and regional differences in possible future soil collapse.

Therefore, we built a computer model that was trained with field observations. We run the model with the projected air temperatures for 2025-2050. The model suggests that the southern part of the study area in the Yukon flats may experience average soil collapse of about 20 inches by 2050. The northern part of the study area in the North Slope would experience almost no collapse by 2050. We also found that the size of the future collapse varies based on the type of vegetation. With used an old vegetation map and created a new map that shows how the collapse varies in small scale across the mapped North-Central Alaska in 2050.