Monitoring permafrost thaw in the Arctic is essential for assessing global climate change impact. Citizen science approaches can make a crucial contribution to this. In a case study using a micro-mapping methodology, visitors of an exhibition mapped polygonal soil patterns in satellite images of the Arctic. The evaluation of the collected data reveals that mapping such patterns poses a bigger challenge than more established tasks, such as building detection. A simplification of the task using a binary detection approach increases the agreement in permafrost mapping. Citizen science shows great potential for permafrost research, although methods must be further tested.