Abstract
Rapid climate warming at northern high latitudes is driving geomorphic changes across the permafrost zone. In the Yamal and Gydan peninsulas in western Siberia, subterranean accumulation of methane beneath or within ice-rich permafrost can create mounds at the land surface. Once over-pressurized by methane, these mounds can explode and eject frozen ground, forming a gas emission crater (GEC). While GECs pose a hazard to human populations and infrastructure, only a small number have been identified in the Yamal and Gydan peninsulas, where the regional distribution and frequency of GECs and other types of land surface change are relatively unconstrained. To understand the distribution of landscape change within 327,000 km2 of the Yamal-Gydan region, we developed a semi-automated multivariate change detection algorithm using satellite-derived surface reflectance, elevation, and water extent in the Google Earth Engine cloud computing platform. We found that 5% of the landscape changed from 1984 to 2017. The algorithm detected all seven GECs reported in the scientific literature and three new GEC-like features, and further revealed that retrogressive thaw slumps were more abundant than GECs. Our methodology can be refined to detect and better understand diverse types of land surface change and potentially mitigate risks across the northern permafrost zone.
Highlights
Rapid climate warming [1] and intensifying hydrologic cycles [2] at northern high latitudes are driving a suite of landscape changes, including changes in vegetation productivity [3], thawing of perennially frozen soils [4], and lake expansion and drainage [5]
While gas emission crater (GEC) pose a hazard to human populations and infrastructure, only a small number have been identified in the Yamal and Gydan peninsulas, where the regional distribution and frequency of GECs and other types of land surface change are relatively unconstrained
Land surface change occurred among 14 categories of vegetation of the Circumpolar Arctic Vegetation Map (CAVM), which could be generalized into four land cover categories (Table 1)
Summary
Rapid climate warming [1] and intensifying hydrologic cycles [2] at northern high latitudes are driving a suite of landscape changes, including changes in vegetation productivity [3], thawing of perennially frozen soils (permafrost) [4], and lake expansion and drainage [5]. In the northern permafrost zone, where thermokarst causes vertical land surface displacement, multi-temporal digital surface models and digital elevation models stand to enhance the detection of thermokarst at its onset by tracking vertical changes at the land surface. Such data are typically acquired by drone or aircraft, and can support detailed investigations from local to regional scales (e.g., [8]). The panArctic ArcticDEM data are freely available on the cloud computing platform Google Earth Engine [15], enabling rapid computations on terabytes of data for investigating geomorphic change at northern high latitudes
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a callDisclaimer: All third-party content on this website/platform is and will remain the property of their respective owners and is provided on "as is" basis without any warranties, express or implied. Use of third-party content does not indicate any affiliation, sponsorship with or endorsement by them. Any references to third-party content is to identify the corresponding services and shall be considered fair use under The CopyrightLaw.
