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Permafrost warming has the potential to amplify global climate change, because when frozen sediments thaw it unlocks soil organic carbon. Yet to date, no globally consistent assessment of permafrost temperature change has been compiled. Here we use a global data set of permafrost temperature time series from the Global Terrestrial Network for Permafrost to evaluate temperature change across permafrost regions for the period since the International Polar Year (2007–2009). During the reference decade between 2007 and 2016, ground temperature near the depth of zero annual amplitude in the continuous permafrost zone increased by 0.39 ± 0.15 °C. Over the same period, discontinuous permafrost warmed by 0.20 ± 0.10 °C. Permafrost in mountains warmed by 0.19 ± 0.05 °C and in Antarctica by 0.37 ± 0.10 °C. Globally, permafrost temperature increased by 0.29 ± 0.12 °C. The observed trend follows the Arctic amplification of air temperature increase in the Northern Hemisphere. In the discontinuous zone, however, ground warming occurred due to increased snow thickness while air temperature remained statistically unchanged.
The initiation of a marine ice-sheet instability (MISI) is generally discussed from the ocean side of the ice sheet. It has been shown that the reduction in ice-shelf buttressing and softening of the coastal ice can destabilize a marine ice sheet if the bedrock is sloping upward towards the ocean. Using a conceptional flow-line geometry, we investigate the possibility of whether a MISI can be triggered from the direction of the ice divide as opposed to coastal forcing and explore the interaction between connected basins. We find that the initiation of a MISI in one basin can induce a destabilization in the other. The underlying mechanism of basin interaction is based on dynamic thinning and a consecutive motion of the ice divide which induces a thinning in the adjacent basin and a successive initiation of the instability. Our simplified and symmetric topographic setup allows scaling both the geometry and the transition time between both instabilities. We find that the ice profile follows a universal shape that is scaled with the horizontal extent of the ice sheet and that the same exponent of 1/2 applies for the scaling relation between central surface elevation and horizontal extent as in the pure shallow ice approximation (Vialov profile). Altering the central bed elevation, we find that the extent of grounding-line retreat in one basin determines the degree of interaction with the other. Different scenarios of basin interaction are discussed based on our modeling results as well as on a conceptual flux-balance analysis. We conclude that for the three-dimensional case, the possibility of drainage basin interaction on timescales on the order of 1 kyr or larger cannot be excluded and hence needs further investigation.