The importance of coastal permafrost loss in the Pan-Arctic
When the topic of climate change is brought up, what do you think of instinctively? Maybe changes in the Arctic sea ice, or maybe polar bears losing their habitats or even glaciers retreating away up the valleys? These changes are happening due to increases in greenhouse gases (GHG) into the atmosphere, which in turn is absorbing heat energy, and dissipating clouds and yearlong snow fall – both of which directly act to reflect this heat energy into the ground where permafrost lays.
Permafrost is a thick layer of soil below the land surface that remains below freezing point throughout the year. Sleeping for many years, the permafrost acts as a nice safe frozen cap over archaic biological gaseous and liquid material that will readily come out and re-join our atmosphere if exposed. Here in these deep and massive carbon sinks is where my interest lays… permafrost and methane seeps.
The reason that the atmosphere is getting warmer is because the gas molecules absorb infrared light on its way out of the Earth’s atmosphere. As they absorb the light, they enter a state of excitedness, begin to vibrate, and release energy in the form of heat. Methane has a lot more vibrational modes than carbon dioxide (CO2), allowing it to bend and be ‘flexible’, which in turn allows it to trap 120 times more heat than CO2.
Methane is currently much less abundant in the atmosphere, but due to its heating capacity it is contributing significantly to climate change. In the third year of my Marine Science undergraduate degree at the Scottish Association for Marine Science (SAMS) in Oban, Scotland, I moved to a settlement called Longyearbyen on Spitsbergen, the largest island on the Svalbard archipelago in the high Arctic.
I lived here for four years to finish my undergraduate and my Masters degrees at the University Centre in Svalbard (UNIS). A truly wonderful frozen place and a fantastically established university for the big four sciences innately regarding the Pan-Arctic. (the Pan-Arctic means the whole arctic region, including the Arctic Ocean and land areas). Svalbard is warming considerably faster than most areas in the Arctic due to the island being fed by a warm water current from the Atlantic Ocean.
During this time, I fell in love with and studied permafrost loss across various terrestrial land types: ice wedge, aeolian sand valleys, maritime coastal and periglacial. My supervisor and I noted that these carbon sinks of deep permafrost were in summer producing methane springs in front of the glaciers that were retreating in the hot summer sun. The permafrost was failing to step in to form a protective frozen ice cap layer and the methane was literally bubbling up.
Once I finished my degrees, I began my journey in search of putting what I had learned into a career. It was one of the most difficult times of my life. I went for interview after interview and faced rejection. A small bit of warning from me here, finding a job after university will be the hardest job you will ever have! But please stick at it and keep applying because eventually you will find a job that you never imagined ever existing… and it will be the best job you will ever have!
I found my place in HX| Hurtigruten Expeditions for whom I am now an Environmental Scientist and Expedition Guide. I travel the world educating tourists about the destinations we visit, presenting important environmental topics like paleogeology, plastic pollution or climate issues in our Polar regions. When I am not helping to deliver the onboard program of lectures and workshops, I am out in the open water in an expedition boat collecting environmental data and plankton samples while seeing amazing remote, hard-to-reach and sensitive areas around the world. And you know what? I adore my job! It never feels like work because it is what I am meant to be doing in my life.
One of my roles is to help collect cloud data in the Arctic, since there is currently limited data within the polar regions. As we are on a ship, we can help fill in the data gaps. At HX we collate this data with our guests, acting as Citizen Scientists, and submit it to NASA for comparison with their satellite data and images. Why do we do this? Well clouds actually act a bit like greenhouse gases themselves, they help to regulate the global temperature by capturing and releasing infrared (heat) energy in the atmosphere. They also reflect heat energy back into space due to the albedo effect (a surfaces ability to reflect sunlight, lighter surfaces such as clouds having a greater reflective ability compared to dark surfaces that absorb the sun’s rays). What we have to do is wait for one of NASA’s satellites to fly over the ship. At this time, the satellite is taking photos of Earth looking downward, so we take photos with our guests from the ship looking back upwards to space. This then creates a comparison and NASA can use can infer how the climate is being affected by changes in cloud cover.
Of course, it is not only clouds that are light surfaces with a high albedo effect, snow and ice also have albedo. Snow acts as a reflectant surface to the sun’s heat energy being received from space down onto the ground. Conversely, if the snow fails to fall one year, then the dark soils, barren of vegetation, can act to absorb this heat energy. The upper layer of the terrain will heat and so the permafrost will develop something called an Active Layer: a seasonally thawed layer above the permafrost. At this point, the thawed layer allows the methane being released to reach the surface.
At HX I discuss the importance of changing climates with our guests and when we land at these isolated areas, I look out for signs of permafrost loss in coastal areas to bring the subject to life. Sometimes we can come across an embankment eroding into a water course. This type of outcrop gives us a fantastic view of what goes on underground if the erosion is fresh. The lines at which the active layer and permafrost begins is very clear in the soil horizon. At HX we always respect and give back to the areas we visit, so as Environmental Scientist I help to organise beach cleans at many sites where guests help to pick up plastic and other waste in these isolated areas and we can take it away for disposal on our ship. During landings in remote and sensitive areas we wash and clean our shoes and clothing before and after leaving the ship and going onto land to prevent the spread of non-native species and disease. We also set up flagged walk paths to keep guests in as small an area as possible to minimise trampling. We visit permafrost landscapes and discuss what we can see and get a first-hand experience of why permafrost is so important to our world’s future carbon content, and I get great satisfaction from being able to guide people on mindful adventures and educate them on our changing world.
- You can see up to date data on permafrost in the Arctic at the following websites, go check them out:
ESA Climate Office1: This site provides data on permafrost fraction, mean annual ground temperature in permafrost areas for the Northern Hemisphere, permafrost extent for the Northern Hemisphere, and permafrost active layer thickness for the Northern Hemisphere. - AWI2The Arctic Landscape EXplorer (ALEX) presents change data derived from remote sensing analysis for permafrost regions throughout the Arctic. The Global Terrestrial Network for Permafrost (GTN-P) provides a dynamic database containing data on borehole temperatures and thicknesses of the seasonal thaw layer from Arctic, Antarctic and mountain permafrost regions.
- Global Terrestrial Network for Permafrost (GTN-P)3: This site allows you to download both metadata and dataset about permafrost temperature and annual thaw depth.
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