Human-caused climate change is shortening the snow cover period in the Arctic.
Human-caused climate change is shortening the snow cover period in the Arctic. But according to new research led by Earth system scientists at the University of California, Irvine, some parts of the Arctic are getting deeper snowpack than normal, and that deep snow is driving the thawing of long-frozen permafrost carbon reserves and leading to increased emissions of greenhouse gasses like carbon dioxide and methane.
“It is the first long-term experiment where we directly measure the mobilization of ancient carbon year-round to show that deeper snow has the possibility to rather quickly mobilize carbon deep in the soil,” said Claudia Czimczik, a professor of Earth system science and the lead author of the study, which appears in AGU Advances. “Unfortunately, it supports the notion that permafrost carbon emissions will be contributing to already-rising atmospheric CO2 levels.”
Fieldwork for the study took place at the International Tundra Experiment at Toolik Lake in Alaska, an experiment started in 1994 by study co-lead author Jeff Welker of the University of Alaska. The original goal of the experiment, Welker explained, was to understand how deeper snow would affect Arctic tundra ecosystems.
Read more at: University of California - Irvine
The ITEX snow fence experiment at Toolik Field Station in Alaska. During the pandemic, UCI’s Claudia Czimczik and colleagues still found a way to collect data at the station using a UCI-built emissions detector. (Photo Credit: Amanda Young / Toolik Field Station)
