Climate scientists know that carbon trapped in permafrost is a huge potential contributor to global warming once the frozen soil thaws. Arctic permafrost contains the largest terrestrial pool of organic carbon on the planet, exceeding the carbon already circulating in Earth's atmosphere.
As Arctic regions warm — and the melting ice and thawing soil decompose to release vast amounts of carbon and methane — there's no telling how much that will accelerate climate change, says biogeochemist Suzanne Tank, an expert in the cycling of various elements underpinning all life.
"Even a partial mobilization of permafrost carbon may propel our current atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations into heights unknown in recent Earth history," she writes, along with environmental soil scientist David Olefeldt and permafrost expert Duane Froese.
"We don't now have a great sense of the degree to which permafrost thaw is contributing to the accelerated accumulation of CO2," says Tank. "It's not accounted for in the frameworks of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), so it's something we argue we need to quantify."
The three University of Alberta researchers have received $1 million from Schmidt Sciences to lead the Canadian arm of a $45-million international partnership to advance our understanding of how the global carbon cycle drives climate change.
"We all need to work together to answer these questions over broad scales and different landscape types," says Tank.
Tank and Froese, both in the U of A's Faculty of Science, and Olefeldt of the Faculty of Life, Agricultural & Environmental Sciences (ALES) will collaborate with researchers from the Northwest Territories Geological Survey and the Aurora Research Institute, along with partners at the University of Alaska Fairbanks and in Europe. The Canadian fieldwork will focus on permafrost landscapes in and around the Mackenzie Delta, the central Mackenzie Valley, Fort Simpson, Norman Wells and Yellowknife, drawing partly on data the three have together collected over decades.
"We are going to lead the on-the-ground work in Canada, based on our long place-based relationships," says Tank, adding that her own research focuses on the current and future functioning of the land-freshwater-ocean continuum.
"We think about climate change, permafrost, carbon cycling and nutrient dynamics, and how these processes act and interact in freshwaters and connected systems from the Canadian Arctic to the Pacific Coast," she says.
Froese's group looks at the development and understanding of past records of environmental change, with a particular interest in permafrost and its responses to climate change today and in the past. He is also director of the U of A's Permafrost Archives Science Laboratory.
Olefeldt studies the catchment carbon cycling in boreal to Arctic landscapes, with a focus on the role of wetlands, which are sensitive to disturbances like permafrost thaw. He also leads the Catchment and Wetland Sciences Research Group in ALES.
Four teams of international university researchers, including the U of A's, will collect high-resolution data needed to generate climate forecasts with the help of AI and machine learning. Other global projects include groundbreaking research into carbon fluxes in central Africa's tropical forests and observations of the Southern Ocean in winter.
"We are just starting to understand the true extent of humankind's effect on the intricately woven systems of land, sea and air," says Wendy Schmidt, co-founder of Schmidt Sciences.
Tank says her team aims to help inform the Global Carbon Budget and IPCC with accurate, quantitative data on rapid permafrost thaw, providing remote sensing and model-based insights for decision-makers both locally and globally.
