[1] Thermokarst lakes alter landscape topography and hydrology in widespread permafrost regions and mobilize significant permafrost carbon pools, including releasing methane (CH 4 ) to the atmosphere. Despite this, the dynamics of lake evolution, permafrost thawing, and carbon mobilization are not well known. We present a 3-D numerical model of thermokarst lakes on organic-rich yedoma permafrost terrains with surface water flow and pooling naturally defining lakes that deepen, expand laterally, and drain due to talik formation, bank retreat, and both gradual and catastrophic drainage. We predict the 3-D pattern of microbial methane production within the talik over time. As a first model test and calibration, beginning with small protolakes, we simulated 10,000 years of evolution of Pear and Claudi lakes, two neighboring thermokarst features on the northern Seward Peninsula, Alaska. Simulated lakes approximated observed bathymetry, but results are sensitive to initial topography and soil ice content. Local topography caused markedly different dynamics for the two lakes. Pear expanded rapidly across low-relief topography, fully drained multiple times, and released little methane in later stages due to Pleistocene carbon depletion by the first and largest lake generation. Claudi grew slowly and continuously across high-relief topography, forming high subaerial banks; partial drainages left remnant horseshoe lakes that continued to expand into virgin yedoma, mobilizing carbon at roughly the same rate irrespective of lake drainage. The $2Â discrepancy between simulated CH 4 production and observed emission rates in Claudi likely results from misestimation of hot spot ebullition, labile carbon content, CH 4 :CO 2 production ratio, or microbial CH 4 oxidation.

Sediment management is a fundamental part of reservoir operation, but it is often complicated by metal(loid) enrichment in sediments. Knowledge concerning the sources of potential contaminants is therefore of important significance. To address this issue, the concentrations and the mobile fractions of metal(loid)s were determined in the sediments and the respective catchment areas of six reservoirs. The results indicate that reservoirs generally have a high potential for contaminated sediment accumulation due to preferential deposition of fine particles. The median values of the element-specific enrichment factor (EF) demonstrates slight enrichments of arsenic (EF: 3.4), chromium (EF: 2.8), and vanadium (EF: 2.9) for reservoir sediments. The enrichments of cadmium (EF: 8.2), manganese (EF: 3.9), nickel (EF: 4.8), and zinc (EF: 5.0) are significantly higher. This is enabled by a diffuse element release from the soils into the impounded streams, which is particularly favored by soil acidity. Leaching from the catchment soils partially enriches elements in stream sediments before their fine-grained portions in particular are deposited as reservoir sediment. We assume that this effect is of high relevance especially for reservoirs impounding small streams with forested catchments and weakly acid buffering parent material of soil formation.