John Alan Heginbottom (1943–2022)

Branch, Alan spent his career at GSC undertaking and supervising research in surficial geology and surface processes, with particular emphasis on permafrost regions.After 2006, Alan was active as a consultant in the fields of permafrost, Arctic geomorphology, natural hazards, and environmental assessment.At the start of his career, Alan compiled surficial geology maps for parts of British Columbia, but he soon transferred his interests to Arctic Canada, working in the Yukon, Northwest Territories (NWT), and what is now Nunavut.His research particularly focused on issues of mapping the distribution and characteristics of permafrost, especially its ground ice content.He was the lead author on the extant official map of permafrost in Canada (Heginbottom et al., 1995) and was the Canadian co-author of the International Permafrost Association's circum-Arctic map of permafrost and ground ice (Brown et al., 1997), a seminal synthesis that has been cited more than one thousand times.He led work to create maps at smaller (i.e. more detailed) scales for parts of the Yukon and NWT where topography, climate, and Quaternary history significantly influence permafrost distribution and ice content (Heginbottom and Radburn, 1992).He was a co-author on northern hemisphere estimates of permafrost area and ground ice volume, papers that have also been widely recognized (Zhang et al., 1999(Zhang et al., , 2000)).He thought deeply about the cartographic challenge of portraying permafrost, by its nature an invisible phenomenon and one that has variable contiguity (Heginbottom, 2002).In addition to his mapping research, Alan was an author or co-author on papers concerned with a wide range of topics, including retrogressive thaw slumps, terrain sensitivity, ground ice distribution, and snowmelt hydrology.Most of these appeared in government publications, such as the GSC reports of activities and bulletins.He also wrote a number of synthesis chapters and entries for encyclopedias on permafrost environments.