This research addresses the degradation and subsidence resulting from permafrost thawing. These events must be taken into account in the designing of cold region structures like roads, railroads, airfields, dams, pipelines, and buildings. A predictive model will be developed where the permafrost thaw consolidations will be described, taking into account the simultaneous phenomena in water, ice and of heat flow in consolidating porous media. This unique problem of multiphase transport is governed by nonlinear equations and will be solved by the developed finite element technique. The results will give the temporal and spatial distribution of pore water pressure, temperature, ice content, and displacments in an unsaturated, thawing, deformable soil.
