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Abstract Climate‐driven thawing of Arctic permafrost renders its vast carbon reserves susceptible to microbial degradation, serving as a potentially potent positive feedback hidden within the climate system. While seemingly intuitive, the relationship between thermally driven permafrost losses and organic carbon (OC) export remains largely unexplored in natural settings. Filling this knowledge gap, we present down‐core bulk and compound‐specific radiocarbon records of permafrost change from a sediment core taken within the Alaskan Colville River delta spanning the lastc. 2,700 years. Fingerprinted by significantly older radiocarbon ages of bulk OC and long‐chain fatty acids, these data expose a thermally driven increase in permafrost OC export and/or deepening of mobilizable permafrost layers over the lastc. 160 years after the Little Ice Age. Comparison of OC content and radiocarbon data between recent and Roman warming episodes likely implies that the rate of warming, alongside the prevailing boundary conditions, may dictate the ultimate fate of the Arctic's permafrost inventory. Our findings highlight the importance of leveraging geological records as archives of Arctic permafrost mobilization dynamics with temperature change.
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CASCADE – The Circum-Arctic Sediment CArbon DatabasE
Abstract. Biogeochemical cycling in the semi-enclosed Arctic Ocean is stronglyinfluenced by land–ocean transport of carbon and other elements and isvulnerable to environmental and climate changes. Sediments of the ArcticOcean are an important part of biogeochemical cycling in the Arctic andprovide the opportunity to study present and historical input and the fate oforganic matter (e.g., through permafrost thawing). Comprehensive sedimentary records are required to compare differencesbetween the Arctic regions and to study Arctic biogeochemical budgets. Tothis end, the Circum-Arctic Sediment CArbon DatabasE (CASCADE) wasestablished to curate data primarily on concentrations of organic carbon(OC) and OC isotopes (δ13C, Δ14C) yet also ontotal N (TN) as well as terrigenous biomarkers and other sedimentgeochemical and physical properties. This new database builds on thepublished literature and earlier unpublished records through an extensiveinternational community collaboration. This paper describes the establishment, structure and current status ofCASCADE. The first public version includes OC concentrations in surfacesediments at 4244 oceanographic stations including 2317 with TNconcentrations, 1555 with δ13C-OC values and 268 with Δ14C-OC values and 653 records with quantified terrigenous biomarkers(high-molecular-weight n-alkanes, n-alkanoic acids and lignin phenols).CASCADE also includes data from 326 sediment cores, retrieved by shallowbox or multi-coring, deep gravity/piston coring, or sea-bottom drilling.The comprehensive dataset reveals large-scale features of both OC contentand OC sources between the shelf sea recipients. This offers insight intorelease of pre-aged terrigenous OC to the East Siberian Arctic shelf andyounger terrigenous OC to the Kara Sea. Circum-Arctic sediments therebyreveal patterns of terrestrial OC remobilization and provide clues about thawing of permafrost. CASCADE enables synoptic analysis of OC in Arctic Ocean sediments andfacilitates a wide array of future empirical and modeling studies of theArctic carbon cycle. The database is openly and freely available online(https://doi.org/10.17043/cascade; Martens et al., 2021), is provided in variousmachine-readable data formats (data tables, GIS shapefile, GIS raster), andalso provides ways for contributing data for future CASCADE versions. Wewill continuously update CASCADE with newly published and contributed dataover the foreseeable future as part of the database management of the BolinCentre for Climate Research at Stockholm University.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1917469
- PAR ID:
- 10344777
- Author(s) / Creator(s):
- ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; more »
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Earth System Science Data
- Volume:
- 13
- Issue:
- 6
- ISSN:
- 1866-3516
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 2561 to 2572
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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Abstract. Climate warming in the Arctic results in thawing permafrost and associated processes like thermokarst, especially in ice-rich permafrost regions. Since permafrost soils are one of the largest organic carbon reservoirs of the world, their thawing leads to the release of greenhouse gases due to increasing microbial activity with rising soil temperature, further exacerbating climate warming. To enhance the predictions of potential future impacts of permafrost thaw, a detailed assessment of changes in soil characteristics in response to thermokarst processes in permafrost landscapes is needed, which we investigated in this study in an Arctic coastal lowland. We analysed six sediment cores from the Arctic Coastal Plain of northern Alaska, each representing a different landscape feature along a gradient from upland to thermokarst lake and drained basin to thermokarst lagoon in various development stages. For the analysis, a multiproxy approach was used, including sedimentological (grain size, bulk density, ice content), biogeochemical (total organic carbon (TOC), TOC density (TOCvol), total nitrogen (TN), stable carbon isotopes (δ13C), TOC/TN ratio, mercury (Hg)), and lipid biomarker (n-alkanes, n-alkanols, and their ratios) parameters. We found that a semi-drained state of thermokarst lakes features the lowest OC content, and TOC and TN are generally higher in unfrozen deposits, hinting at a more intact state of organic matter. Indicated by the average chain length (ACL), δ13C, Paq, and Pwax, we found a stronger influence of aquatic organic matter (OM) in the OM composition in the soils covered by water compared to those not covered by water. Moreover, the results of the δ13C, TOC/TN ratio, and CPI indicate that the saline deposits contain stronger degraded OM than the deposits not influenced by saltwater. Additionally, we found positive correlations between the TOC and TOCvol and the Hg content in the deposits. The results indicate that thermokarst-influenced deposits tend to accumulate Hg during thawed periods and thus contain more Hg than the upland permafrost deposits that have not been impacted by lake formation. Our findings offer valuable insights into the dynamics of carbon storage and vulnerability to decomposition in coastal permafrost landscapes, reflecting the interplay of environmental factors, landform characteristics, and climate change impacts on Arctic permafrost environments.more » « less
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Sediments covering Arctic continental shelves are uniquely impacted by ice processes. Delivery of sediments is generally limited to the summer, when rivers are ice free, permafrost bluffs are thawing, and sea ice is undergoing its seasonal retreat. Once delivered to the coastal zone, sediments follow complex pathways to their final depocenters—for example, fluvial sediments may experience enhanced seaward advection in the spring due to routing under nearshore sea ice; during the open-water season, boundary-layer transport may be altered by strong stratification in the ocean due to ice melt; during the fall storm season, sediments may be entrained into sea ice through the production of anchor ice and frazil; and in the winter, large ice keels more than 20 m tall plow the seafloor (sometimes to seabed depths of 1–2 m), creating a type of physical mixing that dwarfs the decimeter-scale mixing from bioturbation observed in lower-latitude shelf systems. This review summarizes the work done on subtidal sediment dynamics over the last 50 years in Arctic shelf systems backed by soft-sediment coastlines and suggests directions for future sediment studies in a changing Arctic. Reduced sea ice, increased wave energy, and increased sediment supply from bluffs (and possibly rivers) will likely alter marine sediment dynamics in the Arctic now and into the future.more » « less
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-13-2561-2021
