Publications by authors named "Madison M Douglas"
Article Synopsis
- The migration rate of Arctic rivers is crucial for the stability of local infrastructure and communities, as well as for controlling the flow of carbon and nutrients to oceans.
- Conflicting views exist on whether permafrost slows down or speeds up river migration, complicating predictions in a warming Arctic environment.
- New computational methods reveal that permafrost decreases erosion rates by 47%, and models predict that its complete thaw could accelerate river migration by 30-100%.
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.
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