Drainage network response to Arctic warming.

Rapid Arctic warming may increase erosion and stream channel formation, which alters the flux of sediments, carbon, and nutrients in these sensitive ecosystems. Yet, understanding landscape change is hampered by a lack of predictive tools applicable to permafrost settings.

Climate Signatures on Lake And Wetland Size Distributions in Arctic Deltas.

Understanding how thermokarst lakes on arctic river deltas will respond to rapid warming is critical for projecting how carbon storage and fluxes will change in those vulnerable environments. Yet, this understanding is currently limited partly due to the complexity of disentangling significant interannual variability from the longer-term surface water signatures on the landscape, using the short summertime window of optical spaceborne observations. Here, we rigorously separate perennial lakes from ephemeral wetlands on 12 arctic deltas and report distinct size distributions and climate trends for the two waterbodies.

Impact of River Channel Lateral Migration on Microbial Communities across a Discontinuous Permafrost Floodplain.

Permafrost soils store approximately twice the amount of carbon currently present in Earth's atmosphere and are acutely impacted by climate change due to the polar amplification of increasing global temperature. Many organic-rich permafrost sediments are located on large river floodplains, where river channel migration periodically erodes and redeposits the upper tens of meters of sediment. Channel migration exerts a first-order control on the geographic distribution of permafrost and floodplain stratigraphy and thus may affect microbial habitats.

Arctic soil patterns analogous to fluid instabilities.

Slow-moving arctic soils commonly organize into striking large-scale spatial patterns called solifluction terraces and lobes. Although these features impact hillslope stability, carbon storage and release, and landscape response to climate change, no mechanistic explanation exists for their formation. Everyday fluids-such as paint dripping down walls-produce markedly similar fingering patterns resulting from competition between viscous and cohesive forces.

Extrapolating active layer thickness measurements across Arctic polygonal terrain using LiDAR and data sets.

Landscape attributes that vary with microtopography, such as active layer thickness (), are labor intensive and difficult to document effectively through in situ methods at kilometer spatial extents, thus rendering remotely sensed methods desirable. Spatially explicit estimates of can provide critically needed data for parameterization, initialization, and evaluation of Arctic terrestrial models. In this work, we demonstrate a new approach using high-resolution remotely sensed data for estimating centimeter-scale in a 5 km area of ice-wedge polygon terrain in Barrow, Alaska.