Climate Change Drives Widespread and Rapid Thermokarst Development in Very Cold Permafrost in the Canadian High Arctic

Climate warming in regions of ice‐rich permafrost can result in widespread thermokarst development, which reconfigures the landscape and damages infrastructure. We present multisite time series observations which couple ground temperature measurements with thermokarst development in a region of very...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Geophysical research letters 2019-06, Vol.46 (12), p.6681-6689
Main Authors: Farquharson, Louise M., Romanovsky, Vladimir E., Cable, William L., Walker, Donald A., Kokelj, Steven V., Nicolsky, Dmitry
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Active layer
Air temperature
Arctic
Arctic climates
Climate change
Cold
Collapse
Degradation
Global warming
Ground ice
ground temperature
Ground temperatures
Ice
Melts
monitoring
Organic soils
Permafrost
Regions
Soil
Soil degradation
Soil layers
Temperature measurement
Thawing
Thermokarst
Thickness
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Summary:Climate warming in regions of ice‐rich permafrost can result in widespread thermokarst development, which reconfigures the landscape and damages infrastructure. We present multisite time series observations which couple ground temperature measurements with thermokarst development in a region of very cold permafrost. In the Canadian High Arctic between 2003 and 2016, a series of anomalously warm summers caused mean thawing indices to be 150–240% above the 1979–2000 normal resulting in up to 90 cm of subsidence over the 12‐year observation period. Our data illustrate that despite low mean annual ground temperatures, very cold permafrost (
ISSN:0094-8276
1944-8007
DOI:10.1029/2019GL082187