Abstract
The combination of climatic warming and wetting can increase the CO2 sink strength of High Arctic semi-deserts by an order of magnitude, according to a long-term climate manipulation experiment in northwest Greenland. These findings indicate that parts of the High Arctic have the potential to remain a strong carbon sink under future global warming.
Highlights
The carbon (C) balance of permafrost regions is predicted to be extremely sensitive to climatic changes[1,2,3]
We lack data sets addressing how water–temperature interactions control C cycling, including magnitudes of tundra–atmosphere C exchange and stability of old permafrost C pools that have accumulated over millennia[16,17,18]
We explored the magnitudes of tundra–atmosphere C exchange and loss of old permafrost C pools under today’s and predicted future climate conditions with experimental wetting and warming[20] in northwest Greenland
Summary
We quantified net ecosystem exchange of CO2 (NEE), gross primary productivity (GPP) and Reco, from a High Arctic semi-desert over two or three consecutive summers in a set of long-term (about 10 years) summer warming and/or wetting treatments in northwest Greenland (Supplementary Information). Experimental warming-only resulted in older CO2 being respired at all depths, except the rooting zone (Fig. 2b), indicating that long-term warming increased the loss of mainly slow-accumulating, old C pools. This was most visible during the drier and warmer year. As the High Arctic spans only ∼10% of the Northern Hemisphere permafrost area, it contains a relatively small fraction
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