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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.
Local observations indicate that climate change and shifting disturbance regimes are causing permafrost degradation. However, the occurrence and distribution of permafrost region disturbances (PRDs) remain poorly resolved across the Arctic and Subarctic. Here we quantify the abundance and distribution of three primary PRDs using time-series analysis of 30-m resolution Landsat imagery from 1999 to 2014. Our dataset spans four continental-scale transects in North America and Eurasia, covering ~10% of the permafrost region. Lake area loss (−1.45%) dominated the study domain with enhanced losses occurring at the boundary between discontinuous and continuous permafrost regions. Fires were the most extensive PRD across boreal regions (6.59%), but in tundra regions (0.63%) limited to Alaska. Retrogressive thaw slumps were abundant but highly localized (<10−5%). Our analysis synergizes the global-scale importance of PRDs. The findings highlight the need to include PRDs in next-generation land surface models to project the permafrost carbon feedback.
Sub-seasonal thaw slump mass wasting is not consistently energy limited at the landscape scale
(2018)
Predicting future thaw slump activity requires a sound understanding of the atmospheric drivers and geomorphic controls on mass wasting across a range of timescales. On sub-seasonal timescales, sparse measurements indicate that mass wasting at active slumps is often limited by the energy available for melting ground ice, but other factors such as rainfall or the formation of an insulating veneer may also be relevant. To study the sub-seasonal drivers, we derive topographic changes from single-pass radar interferometric data acquired by the TanDEM-X satellites. The estimated elevation changes at 12m resolution complement the commonly observed planimetric retreat rates by providing information on volume losses. Their high vertical precision (around 30 cm), frequent observations (11 days) and large coverage (5000 km(2)) allow us to track mass wasting as drivers such as the available energy change during the summer of 2015 in two study regions. We find that thaw slumps in the Tuktoyaktuk coastlands, Canada, are not energy limited in June, as they undergo limited mass wasting (height loss of around 0 cm day 1) despite the ample available energy, suggesting the widespread presence of early season insulating snow or debris veneer. Later in summer, height losses generally increase (around 3 cm day 1), but they do so in distinct ways. For many slumps, mass wasting tracks the available energy, a temporal pattern that is also observed at coastal yedoma cliffs on the Bykovsky Peninsula, Russia. However, the other two common temporal trajectories are asynchronous with the available energy, as they track strong precipitation events or show a sudden speed-up in late August respectively. The observed temporal patterns are poorly related to slump characteristics like the headwall height. The contrasting temporal behaviour of nearby thaw slumps highlights the importance of complex local and temporally varying controls on mass wasting.