Defrosting northern catchments: Fluvial effects of permafrost degradation

Tananaev, Nikita; Lotsari, Eliisa

doi:10.1016/j.earscirev.2022.103996

Cited by 27 publications

(21 citation statements)

References 214 publications

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“…Hydrologically, permafrost acts as a largely impermeable layer restricting water infiltration and liquid saturation of soils to a seasonally thawed shallow surface layer (French, 2007;Hinzman et al, 2005;Woo & Winter, 1993). This impermeability also prevents the periodic saturation and draining of riverbank faces that can lead to pore pressure-driven bank collapse commonly observed in seasonally unfrozen banks (Darby & Thorne, 1996;Rinaldi & Casagli, 1999;Tananaev & Lotsari, 2022;Zhao et al, 2022). The role of vegetation in stabilizing riverbanks (Simon & Collison, 2002) may be limited by permafrost restricting rooting depth to shallow seasonally thawed surface layers (Blume-Werry et al, 2019;Jackson et al, 1996).…”

Section: Background 21 State Of Knowledge Regarding Permafrost Influe...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Scale-dependent influence of permafrost on riverbank erosion rates

Rowland

Schwenk

Shelef

et al. 2023

Preprint

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Whether the presence of permafrost systematically alters the rate of riverbank erosion is a fundamental geomorphic question with significant importance to infrastructure, water quality, and biogeochemistry of high latitude watersheds. For over four decades this question has remained unanswered due to a lack of data. Using remotely sensed imagery, we addressed this knowledge gap by quantifying riverbank erosion rates across the Arctic and subarctic. To compare these rates to non-permafrost rivers we assembled a global dataset of published riverbank erosion rates. We found that erosion rates in rivers influenced by permafrost are on average six times lower than non-permafrost systems; erosion rate differences increase up to 40 times for the largest rivers. To test alternative hypotheses for the observed erosion rate difference, we examined differences in total water yield and erosional efficiency between these rivers and non-permafrost rivers. Neither of these factors nor differences in river sediment loads provided compelling alternative explanations, leading us to conclude that permafrost limits riverbank erosion rates. This conclusion was supported by field investigations of rates and patterns of erosion along three rivers flowing through discontinuous permafrost in Alaska. Our results show that permafrost limits maximum bank erosion rates on rivers with stream powers greater than 900 W/m-1. On smaller rivers, however, hydrology rather thaw rate may be dominant control on bank erosion. Our findings suggest that Arctic warming and hydrological changes should increase bank erosion rates on large rivers but may reduce rates on rivers with drainage areas less than a few thousand km2.

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Section: Background 21 State Of Knowledge Regarding Permafrost Influe...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Scale-dependent influence of permafrost on riverbank erosion rates

Rowland

Schwenk

Shelef

et al. 2023

Preprint

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“…Future changes in snowmelt bypass are dependent on whether climate change allows open-drainage lakes to persist or causes them to become closed-drainage, given that snowmelt bypass can only occur when lakes are at or above their outlet level. There are multiple consequences of Arctic warming that will influence lake water balance: changes in rainfall (Bintanja and Andry, 2017) and snowfall (Brown and Mote, 2009;Ernakovich et al, 2014), increases in active layer thickness (Walvoord and Kurylyk, 2016;Tananaev and Lotsari, 2022;Koch et al, 2022), the proliferation of deciduous shrubs (Loranty et al, 2018), and longer lake ice-free periods (Woolway et al, 2020). Whether the combination of these changes will result in an increase or decrease in runoff to lakes is currently unknown (Blöschl et al, 2019) If open-drainage lakes persist as such in the future, we suspect the freshet that is incorporated into lakes may shift towards being more rainfall-sourced.…”

Section: Climate Change and Snowmelt Bypassmentioning

confidence: 99%

Assessing the influence of lake and watershed attributes on snowmelt bypass at thermokarst lakes

Wilcox

Wolfe

Marsh

2022

Hydrol. Earth Syst. Sci.

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Abstract. Snow represents the largest potential source of water for thermokarst lakes, but the runoff generated by snowmelt (freshet) can flow beneath lake ice and via the outlet without mixing with and replacing pre-snowmelt lake water. Although this phenomenon, called “snowmelt bypass”, is common in ice-covered lakes, it is unknown which lake and watershed properties cause variation in snowmelt bypass among lakes. Understanding the variability of snowmelt bypass is important because the amount of freshet that is mixed into a lake affects the hydrological and biogeochemical properties of the lake. To explore lake and watershed attributes that influence snowmelt bypass, we sampled 17 open-drainage thermokarst lakes for isotope analysis before and after snowmelt. Isotope data were used to estimate the amount of lake water replaced by freshet and to observe how the water sources of lakes changed in response to the freshet. Among the lakes, a median of 25.2 % of lake water was replaced by freshet, with values ranging widely from 5.2 % to 52.8 %. For every metre that lake depth increased, the portion of lake water replaced by freshet decreased by an average of 13 %, regardless of the size of the lake's watershed. The thickness of the freshet layer was not proportional to maximum lake depth, so that a relatively larger portion of pre-snowmelt lake water remained isolated in deeper lakes. We expect that a similar relationship between increasing lake depth and greater snowmelt bypass could be present at all ice-covered open-drainage lakes that are partially mixed during the freshet. The water source of freshet that was mixed into lakes was not exclusively snowmelt but a combination of snowmelt mixed with rain-sourced water that was released as the soil thawed after snowmelt. As climate warming increases rainfall and shrubification causes earlier snowmelt timing relative to lake ice melt, snowmelt bypass may become more prevalent, with the water remaining in thermokarst lakes post-freshet becoming increasingly rainfall sourced. However, if climate change causes lake levels to fall below the outlet level (i.e., lakes become closed-drainage), more freshet may be retained by thermokarst lakes as snowmelt bypass will not be able to occur until lakes reach their outlet level.

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“…Such changes will be both vertical and horizontal, resulting in deeper active layers (Abramov et al , 2021), shrinking permafrost extent, and the retreat of its respective zones (Lim et al , 2019;Streletskiy, 2021). The progressing permafrost degradation leads to important and lasting changes in geomorphological processes (Rudyet al , 2017;Tananaev & Lotsari, 2022), hydrological phenomena (Rudy et al , 2017;Suzuki et al , 2021) and biogeochemical cycles (Grosse et al , 2016;Mann et al , 2012;Vonk et al , 2015).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Hydrochemical changes in permafrost regions are increasingly probable, leading to both temporary and permanent hazards to the surface water quality in the Arctic (Brubaker et al , 2012;Gunnarsdóttiret al , 2019). Permafrost active layer deepening and the formation of new thermokarst lakes, taliks and drainage pathways (Dzhamalov & Safronova, 2018;in't Zandt et al , 2020;Tananaev & Lotsari, 2022) all lead to changes in the migration of chemical compounds (Frey & Mcclelland, 2009;Monhonval et al , 2021) both horizontally and vertically (Ji et al , 2021;Tananaev et al , 2021). The newly formed drainage pathways may leach chemical compounds from layers previously disconnected from groundwater flow (Jiet al , 2021;Lim et al , 2019).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Reemission of inorganic pollution from permafrost? – a freshwater hydrochemistry study in the lower Kolyma basin (North-East Siberia)

Szumińska

Kozioł

Chalov

et al. 2022

Preprint

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Permafrost regions are under particular pressure from climate change resulting in widespread landscape changes, which impact also freshwater chemistry. We investigated a snapshot of hydrochemistry in various freshwater environments in the lower Kolyma river basin (North-East Siberia, continuous permafrost zone) to explore the mobility of metals, metalloids and non-metals resulting from permafrost thaw. Particular attention was focused on heavy metals as contaminants potentially released from the secondary source in the permafrozen Yedoma complex. Permafrost creeks represented the Mg-Ca-Na-HCO -Cl-SO ionic water type (with mineralisation in the range 600-800 mg/L), while permafrost ice and thermokarst lake waters were the HCO -Ca-Mg type. Multiple heavy metals (As, Cu, Co, Mn and Ni) showed much higher dissolved phase concentrations in permafrost creeks and ice than in Kolyma and its tributaries, and only in the permafrost samples and one Kolyma tributary have we detected dissolved Ti or Hg. In thermokarst lakes, several metal and metalloid dissolved concentrations increased with water depth (Fe, Mn, Ni and Zn - in both lakes; Al, Cu, K, Sb, Sr and Pb in either lake), reaching 1370 µg/L Cu, 4610 µg/L Mn, and 687 µg/L Zn in the bottom water layers. Permafrost-related waters were also enriched in dissolved phosphorus (up to 512 µg/L in Yedoma-fed creeks). The impact of permafrost thaw on river and lake water chemistry is a complex problem which needs to be considered both in the context of legacy permafrost shrinkage and the interference of the deepening active layer with newly deposited anthropogenic contaminants.

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Defrosting northern catchments: Fluvial effects of permafrost degradation

Cited by 27 publications

References 214 publications

Scale-dependent influence of permafrost on riverbank erosion rates

Scale-dependent influence of permafrost on riverbank erosion rates

Assessing the influence of lake and watershed attributes on snowmelt bypass at thermokarst lakes

Reemission of inorganic pollution from permafrost? – a freshwater hydrochemistry study in the lower Kolyma basin (North-East Siberia)

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