Field experimental study on the effect of thawed depth of frozen alpine meadow soil on rill erosion by snowmelt waterflow

Abstract

Soil erosion by snow or ice melt waterflow is an important type of soil erosion in many high-altitude and high-latitude regions and is further aggravated by climate warming. The snowmelt waterflow erosion process is affected by soil freeze–thaws and is highly dynamically variable. In this study, a methodology was developed to conduct in situ field experiments to investigate the effects of the thawed depth of the frozen soil profile on snowmelt waterflow erosion. The method was implemented on an alpine meadow soil slope at an altitude of 3700 m on the northeastern Tibetan Plateau. The erosion experiments involved five thawed soil depths of 0, 10, 30 (35), 50, and 80 (100) mm under two snowmelt waterflow rates (3 and 5 L/min). When the topsoil was fully frozen or shallow-thawed (≤10 mm), its hydrothermal and structural properties caused a significant lag in the initiation of runoff and delayed soil erosion in the initial stage. The runoff and sediment concentration curves for fully frozen and shallow-thawed soil showed two-stage patterns characteristic of a sediment supply limited in the early stage and subject to hydrodynamic-controlled processes in the later stage. However, this effect did not exist where the thawed soil depth was greater than 30 mm. The deep-thawed cases (≥30 mm) showed normal hydrograph and sedigraph patterns similar to those of the unfrozen soil. The findings of this study are important for understanding the erosion rates of partially thawed soil and for improving erosion simulations in cold regions.