Landforms and degradation pattern of the Batagay thaw slump, Northeastern Siberia

Kizyakov, Alexander I.; Wetterich, Sebastian; Günther, Frank; Opel, Thomas; Jongejans, Loeka L.; Courtin, Jérémy; Meyer, Hanno; Shepelev, Andrei G.; Syromyatnikov, I.; Fedorov, Alexander N.; Зимин, М.В.; Grosse, Guido

doi:10.1016/j.geomorph.2022.108501

Cited by 17 publications

(40 citation statements)

References 54 publications

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“…BMS exposes roughly 50-90 m thick yedoma deposits on the north-east facing slope (e.g., Kizyakov et al, 2023;Kunitsky et al, 2013); yedoma is a unique permafrost deposit in terms of its high volume of ice (50%-90%) and organic-rich sediments. BMS itself provides us not only a window into the past climate due to the exposed ancient permafrost but also a natural laboratory to examine how permafrost thaw proceeds during the present Arctic warming (Kizyakov et al, 2023).…”

Section: Study Sitementioning

confidence: 99%

“…The presence of the BMS has been attracting a good deal of cryological and geomorphological attention because it is the world's largest retrogressive thaw slump, located 12 km southeast of Batagay village (Figure 1b). BMS exposes roughly 50–90 m thick yedoma deposits on the north‐east facing slope (e.g., Kizyakov et al., 2023; Kunitsky et al., 2013); yedoma is a unique permafrost deposit in terms of its high volume of ice (50%–90%) and organic‐rich sediments. BMS itself provides us not only a window into the past climate due to the exposed ancient permafrost but also a natural laboratory to examine how permafrost thaw proceeds during the present Arctic warming (Kizyakov et al., 2023).…”

Section: Study Sitementioning

confidence: 99%

“…Batagay (67°39′30″N, 134°38′40″E) is located on the Yana River, which is 872 km long and covers a 238,000 km 2 basin in a part of the East Siberian Lowlands in the Sakha Republic (Figure 1a). The climate is highly continental with mean annual air temperature of −12.4°C and mean annual precipitation 203 mm during 1988–2017 (Kizyakov et al., 2023; Murton et al., 2022). The presence of the BMS has been attracting a good deal of cryological and geomorphological attention because it is the world's largest retrogressive thaw slump, located 12 km southeast of Batagay village (Figure 1b).…”

Section: Study Sitementioning

confidence: 99%

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Transient Freeze‐Thaw Deformation Responses to the 2018 and 2019 Fires Near Batagaika Megaslump, Northeast Siberia

et al. 2023

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Wildfires in Arctic regions impact landforms via permafrost degradation and subsequent deformation that can last for many years. However, it remains uncertain on if and how much deformations occur, and what controls their magnitude, particularly during the first couple of years. Here, we examine the transient post‐fire deformation responses near the Batagaika megaslump, which is the world's largest retrogressive thaw slump at Batagay, Sakha Republic. There were wildfires in the summers of 2018 and 2019 on the same slope, which could trigger the formation of another megaslump; many fires occurred nearby in 2019. We use interferometric synthetic aperture radar (InSAR) to measure surface displacements, including both post‐fire and span‐fire images. We also perform onsite measurements of temperature and thaw depth around the two scars near Batagaika megaslump in 2019, 2020, and 2021 and around the 2014 scar in 2019. At the three fire scars formed in 2018 and 2019, we demonstrate year‐to‐year and location‐specific changes in the amplitude of subsidence, heave, and duration. The 2018 scar shows cumulative subsidences of up to 10 cm by March 2021, more clearly than the nearby 2019 scar. On the other hand, another 2019 scar adjacent to the 2014 scar shows up to 13 cm net subsidence during the first span‐fire year, although the subsiding area is limited. These diverse transient post‐fire responses demonstrate that under the yedoma area the spatial heterogeneities of the active layer depth and the timing of fires will control subsequent thermokarst processes.

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Section: Study Sitementioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Study Sitementioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Study Sitementioning

confidence: 99%

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Transient Freeze‐Thaw Deformation Responses to the 2018 and 2019 Fires Near Batagaika Megaslump, Northeast Siberia

et al. 2023

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“…Slump growth has involved the processes of ablation of ice in the headwall, thermal erosion of the headwall and slump floor, and permafrost degradation beneath the floor. The slope of the central channel across the slump floor is concave 18 . The channel evacuates some sandy sediment from the slump floor into the adjacent Batagay River, though the rates and volumes remain to be determined.…”

Section: Recent Megaslump Developmentmentioning

confidence: 99%

Batagay megaslump: A review of the permafrost deposits, Quaternary environmental history, and recent development

Murton

Opel

Wetterich

et al. 2023

Permafrost & Periglacial

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The Batagay megaslump, in the Yana Uplands of northern Yakutia, Russia, is the largest known retrogressive thaw slump in the world. The slump exposes a remarkable sequence of Ice Age permafrost deposits that record the interaction of colluvial, eolian and periglacial processes on a hillslope episodically forested during the last 650 ka or more in response to climate variability on glacial-interglacial timescales.Numerous bones, teeth, and occasional carcasses of Pleistocene and Holocene mammals have been recovered from the permafrost. The megaslump developed over the course of several decades in three stages: (1) gullying, (2) thaw slumping, and(3) megaslumping. After disturbance to the taiga vegetation cover in the 1940s-1960s, a hillslope gully formed by the early 1960s. The gully initiated thaw slumping along its central part during the 1980s, with the slump enlarging to megaslump (>20 ha) proportions during the 1990s. By 2019, the area of the slump had reached about 80 ha and its headwall above the slump floor was up to about 55 m high. The main geomorphic processes of slump growth are headwall ablation and thermal erosion, producing a distinctive terrain of icy badlands on the slump floor. Though much of the megaslump is rapidly growing at present, it will probably stabilize eventually as an irregular terrain characterized by sandy ridges and sand-filled elongate depressions formed by degradation of the badlands. Comparison of the Batagay megaslump with megaslumps from northwest Canada reveals several similarities and differences in terms of their geomorphology, permafrost deposits, and Quaternary history.

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“…For instance, climate warming is particularly noticeable in the Arctic where average temperatures appear to increase more than twice as fast as in temperate regions [ 3 ]. One of the most visible consequences is the global thawing of permafrost at increasing depths [ 4 , 5 ], the rapid erosion of permafrost bluffs [ 6 , 7 ], as well as erosion of deep and old permafrost by thaw slumping in hillslopes [ 8 , 9 ]. This rapid permafrost thaw causes mobilization of ancient organic matter previously preserved for millennia in permafrost deep layers, a phenomenon most visible in Siberia, where deep continuous permafrost underlays most of the North Eastern territories.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

An Update on Eukaryotic Viruses Revived from Ancient Permafrost

Alempic

Lartigue

Гончаров

et al. 2023

Viruses

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One quarter of the Northern hemisphere is underlain by permanently frozen ground, referred to as permafrost. Due to climate warming, irreversibly thawing permafrost is releasing organic matter frozen for up to a million years, most of which decomposes into carbon dioxide and methane, further enhancing the greenhouse effect. Part of this organic matter also consists of revived cellular microbes (prokaryotes, unicellular eukaryotes) as well as viruses that have remained dormant since prehistorical times. While the literature abounds on descriptions of the rich and diverse prokaryotic microbiomes found in permafrost, no additional report about “live” viruses have been published since the two original studies describing pithovirus (in 2014) and mollivirus (in 2015). This wrongly suggests that such occurrences are rare and that “zombie viruses” are not a public health threat. To restore an appreciation closer to reality, we report the preliminary characterizations of 13 new viruses isolated from seven different ancient Siberian permafrost samples, one from the Lena river and one from Kamchatka cryosol. As expected from the host specificity imposed by our protocol, these viruses belong to five different clades infecting Acanthamoeba spp. but not previously revived from permafrost: Pandoravirus, Cedratvirus, Megavirus, and Pacmanvirus, in addition to a new Pithovirus strain.

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Landforms and degradation pattern of the Batagay thaw slump, Northeastern Siberia

Cited by 17 publications

References 54 publications

Transient Freeze‐Thaw Deformation Responses to the 2018 and 2019 Fires Near Batagaika Megaslump, Northeast Siberia

Transient Freeze‐Thaw Deformation Responses to the 2018 and 2019 Fires Near Batagaika Megaslump, Northeast Siberia

Batagay megaslump: A review of the permafrost deposits, Quaternary environmental history, and recent development

An Update on Eukaryotic Viruses Revived from Ancient Permafrost

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