Abstract
The future trajectory of greenhouse gas concentrations depends on interactions between climate and the biogeosphere1,2. Thawing of Arctic permafrost could release significant amounts of carbon into the atmosphere in this century3. Ancient Ice Complex deposits outcropping along the ∼7,000-kilometre-long coastline of the East Siberian Arctic Shelf (ESAS)4,5, and associated shallow subsea permafrost6,7, are two large pools of permafrost carbon8, yet their vulnerabilities towards thawing and decomposition are largely unknown9,10,11. Recent Arctic warming is stronger than has been predicted by several degrees, and is particularly pronounced over the coastal ESAS region12,13. There is thus a pressing need to improve our understanding of the links between permafrost carbon and climate in this relatively inaccessible region. Here we show that extensive release of carbon from these Ice Complex deposits dominates (57 ± 2 per cent) the sedimentary carbon budget of the ESAS, the world’s largest continental shelf, overwhelming the marine and topsoil terrestrial components. Inverse modelling of the dual-carbon isotope composition of organic carbon accumulating in ESAS surface sediments, using Monte Carlo simulations to account for uncertainties, suggests that 44 ± 10 teragrams of old carbon is activated annually from Ice Complex permafrost, an order of magnitude more than has been suggested by previous studies14. We estimate that about two-thirds (66 ± 16 per cent) of this old carbon escapes to the atmosphere as carbon dioxide, with the remainder being re-buried in shelf sediments. Thermal collapse and erosion of these carbon-rich Pleistocene coastline and seafloor deposits may accelerate with Arctic amplification of climate warming2,13.
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Acknowledgements
We thank all ISSS-08 colleagues and crew, in particular M. Kruså, P. Andersson and V. Mordukhovich, who helped with sampling. The ISSS program is supported by the Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation, the Far Eastern Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences, the Swedish Research Council, the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the Russian Foundation of Basic Research, the Swedish Polar Research Secretariat and the Nordic Council of Ministers (Arctic Co-Op and TRI-DEFROST programs). Ö.G. and L.S.-G. acknowledge an Academy Research Fellow grant from the Swedish Royal Academy of Sciences and an EU Marie Curie grant, respectively. N.S. and I.P.S. acknowledge grants from the US National Science Foundation and the NOAA OAR Climate Program Office.
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All authors except P.R., T.I.E. and A.A. collected samples. Preparations for bulk organic carbon analyses, stable isotope analysis and radiocarbon analyses were made by J.E.V. (sediments) and L.S.-G. (Ice Complex samples). Radiocarbon analyses on sediments were facilitated by T.I.E. L.S.-G. analysed lipid biomarkers in Muostakh Island samples. A.A. was responsible for the Monte Carlo simulations. Radiochronological measurements on sediment cores were made by P.R. and at Stockholm University. J.E.V. performed data analyses and flux calculations. J.E.V., L.S.-G. and Ö.G. wrote the paper, with input from N.S., I.P.S. and all other authors.
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This file contains Supplementary Figures 1-5, Supplementary Methods and Supplementary Tables 1-10 (see contents for more details). (PDF 5937 kb)
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Vonk, J., Sánchez-García, L., van Dongen, B. et al. Activation of old carbon by erosion of coastal and subsea permafrost in Arctic Siberia. Nature 489, 137–140 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1038/nature11392
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nature11392
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Robie Macdonald
These authors summarize very well the issues with estimating carbon budgets for the Arctic Ocean in their last paragraph and many of the comments are right on the mark. In the original budget that Rudy Stein and I constructed out of sub-budgets for the shelves one thing seemed clear: coastal erosion was a very important source of material for the Russian Shelves. Our sediment budget came pretty close to balance, but that still leaves a lot of room for organic carbon to vary because it's really very difficult to assign C to such a heterogeneous material that can in some cases be almost all peat or the like, and in others, all ice. A second issue for us was the extremely sparse delta14C/d13C data set for Arctic sediments and, to top that off, our worst case for doing the estimates was that pesky East Siberian Shelf, which is huge by anybody's standards. Finally, the rate of loss of carbon from coastal erosion alone may very easily have ramped up a lot recently, again biasing our estimate low. Multiplying 2 for carbon uncertainty by 2 for coastal erosion uncertainty gets us a factor of 4; if we also allow for the loss of organic matter along the way – almost 70 - we now have our order of magnitude, given that we did not account for that particular arrow in the way we estimated our budget.
We have also made a few (badly needed!) 14C measurements from the North American Arctic that post-date the 2004 book (Goñi et al, 2005. Drenzek et al. 2007) and find similarly old carbon in surface sediments out at the shelf edge. But we also found quite a bit of particulate terrigenous carbon sequestered on inorganic material surfaces being metabolized away to be replaced by marine carbon, which might mute the effect of terrigenous POC metabolism. Furthermore, POC coming out of the Yukon and Mackenzie Rivers – more important sources for terrigenous POC on our side of the Arctic – is likewise old (Guo & Macdonald, 2006 Guo et al, 2007). One thing I can say very clearly about the 14C measurements is that they completely change one's view on how the organic carbon system is functioning!
No matter how you cut it, the arctic soil system holds an enormous reservoir of ancient organic carbon that is at risk (McGuire, A.D. et al., 2009), and these authors suggest that it is more at risk than we estimated. While the total amount of Terr carbon they estimate to be moving from soil to shelf sediments is interesting, and needs to be accounted for properly, it is that escape percent – 66% - that raises my eyebrows. That carbon would reflect a stored reservoir that is being released to the atmospheric CO2 pool. In the climate context, that's the worrisome part. More to the point in the climate context, is the question of whether or not these large arrows are significantly a recent product, or whether they have been like this for a long time and are simply part of the pre-industrial global budget. I would add, that another piece of the puzzle here, not discussed, lies in dissolved organic carbon (DOC) pool; there is a bit of a mystery in the interior Arctic Ocean, and some portion of the terrigenous DOC (including DOC from rivers and rendered down POC from coastal erosion) goes into that pool. That portion might be more substantial than we thought (see Griffith, D.R. et al., 2012). Of course, if the POC converts to DOC and goes into the deep-ocean DOC pool, it is held away from the atmospheric CO2 pool. But for how long?