Abstract
Ice-rich permafrost in the circum-Arctic and sub-Arctic (hereafter pan-Arctic), such as late Pleistocene Yedoma, are especially prone to degradation due to climate change or human activity. When Yedoma deposits thaw, large amounts of frozen organic matter and biogeochemically relevant elements return into current biogeochemical cycles. This mobilization of elements has local and global implications: increased thaw in thermokarst or thermal erosion settings enhances greenhouse gas fluxes from permafrost regions. In addition, this ice-rich ground is of special concern for infrastructure stability as the terrain surface settles along with thawing. Finally, understanding the distribution of the Yedoma domain area provides a window into the Pleistocene past and allows reconstruction of Ice Age environmental conditions and past mammoth-steppe landscapes. Therefore, a detailed assessment of the current pan-Arctic Yedoma coverage is of importance to estimate its potential contribution to permafrost-climate feedbacks, assess infrastructure vulnerabilities, and understand past environmental and permafrost dynamics. Building on previous mapping efforts, the objective of this paper is to compile the first digital pan-Arctic Yedoma map and spatial database of Yedoma coverage. Therefore, we 1) synthesized, analyzed, and digitized geological and stratigraphical maps allowing identification of Yedoma occurrence at all available scales, and 2) compiled field data and expert knowledge for creating Yedoma map confidence classes. We used GIS-techniques to vectorize maps and harmonize site information based on expert knowledge. We included a range of attributes for Yedoma areas based on lithological and stratigraphic information from the source maps and assigned three different confidence levels of the presence of Yedoma (confirmed, likely, or uncertain). Using a spatial buffer of 20 km around mapped Yedoma occurrences, we derived an extent of the Yedoma domain. Our result is a vector-based map of the current pan-Arctic Yedoma domain that covers approximately 2,587,000 km2, whereas Yedoma deposits are found within 480,000 km2of this region. We estimate that 35% of the total Yedoma area today is located in the tundra zone, and 65% in the taiga zone. With this Yedoma mapping, we outlined the substantial spatial extent of late Pleistocene Yedoma deposits and created a unique pan-Arctic dataset including confidence estimates.
Highlights
Vast portions of the Arctic and sub-Arctic regions, predominantly in Siberia, the Far East of Russia, Alaska and Yukon, are covered by ice-rich fine-grained permafrost deposits that contain large late Pleistocene syngenetic ice wedges (Sher et al, 1971; Kanevskiy et al, 2011; Schirrmeister et al, 2013)
We estimated the Northern Hemisphere Yedoma domain to cover approximately 2,587,000 km2 located between the Yamal Peninsula in Russia all the way to the Yukon, Canada (Figure 4)
We estimate that 480,000 km2 to be underlain by Yedoma. 35% of the total Yedoma area today is located in the tundra zone, and 65% in the taiga and boreal ecozone
Summary
Vast portions of the Arctic and sub-Arctic regions (hereafter panArctic), predominantly in Siberia, the Far East of Russia, Alaska and Yukon, are covered by ice-rich fine-grained permafrost deposits that contain large late Pleistocene syngenetic ice wedges (Sher et al, 1971; Kanevskiy et al, 2011; Schirrmeister et al, 2013). Yedoma thaw implies substantial consequences for landscape reorganization by surface subsidence (Günther et al, 2015; Antonova et al, 2018), thermal erosion (Kanevskiy et al, 2016; Fuchs et al, 2020; Shur et al, 2021b; Morgenstern et al, 2021), thermokarst formation (Jones et al, 2011; Nitze et al, 2017; Ulrich et al, 2017; Veremeeva et al, 2021), and relief inversion as well as land loss by coastal erosion (Günther et al, 2013; Farquharson et al, 2018) Such changes of the periglacial landscape inventory certainly affect surface and sub-surface drainage patterns across scales, trigger ecosystem responses, and alter floral and faunal species composition and distribution (Pastick et al, 2019; Jones et al, 2020)
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