In 1951 he began fieldwork in the western Arctic, an area then little known to science, interpreting aerial photographs and investigating periglacial features. This work evolved through the next half century – Ross conducted fieldwork in the Arctic almost every year until 2004 – but remained focused on the development of ice-wedge polygons, pingos, ground ice and other aspects of periglacial geomorphology. Well before his retirement Ross became widely recognized as the world’s leading authority on permafrost.

Ross published over 200 scholarly works, over 150 of which are single authored and more than half of which are in refereed journals. Fifty of the papers were published in Ross’s post-“retirement” years. Michael Church and Olav Slaymaker edited a festschrift Field and Theory published in 1985 that marks the revolutionary impact of Ross’s characteristic combination of careful field observation, experimental design, and analytical interpretation in moving physical geography toward an earth systems approach to understanding the behaviour of permafrost terrain.