Subterranean thaw

Climate change is also making itself much more noticeable in the higher latitudes around the polar areas. How rising temperatures also change the cycles in the permafrost ground is being examined by Young Investigators Group Leader Dr. Julia Boike and her team at the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research. She is analysing data at the AWI branch in Potsdam that she has collected on her long expeditions in the Siberian tundra. For example, she is examining the water and energy cycles in the upper layers of the soils, which regulate the release of methane, a greenhouse gas. "We can already observe how changes in the climate system, such as heavier summer precipitations and higher average temperatures, influence the physical and biological processes in the soil," she says. Because the upper layers are meanwhile thawing out much earlier in the year, and the vegetation phases are becoming longer. "We study the water and energy cycles in the permafrost landscape, ranging from areas in the metre scale through to larger structures in the kilometre scale," says Boike. These results allow us to make more reliable forecasts on how the thaw in the tundra could impact the global climate in the future.