Thaw Subsidence of a Yedoma Landscape in Northern Siberia, Measured In Situ and Estimated from TerraSAR-X Interferometry ...

• Main Authors: Antonova, Sofia, Sudhaus, Henriette, Strozzi, Tazio, Zwieback, Simon, Kääb, Andreas, Heim, Birgit, Langer, Moritz, Bornemann, Niko, Boike, Julia
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Published: Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin 2018
• Subjects: permafrost; thaw subsidence; in situ measurements; DInSAR; TerraSAR-X; Lena River Delta; yedoma; 620 Ingenieurwissenschaften und zugeordnete Tätigkeiten; lena river; Siberia
• Online Access: https://dx.doi.org/10.18452/20455; https://edoc.hu-berlin.de/handle/18452/21223

In permafrost areas, seasonal freeze-thaw cycles result in upward and downward movements of the ground. For some permafrost areas, long-term downward movements were reported during the last decade. We measured seasonal and multi-year ground movements in a yedoma region of the Lena River Delta, Siberia, in 2013–2017, using reference rods installed deep in the permafrost. The seasonal subsidence was 1.7 ± 1.5 cm in the cold summer of 2013 and 4.8 ± 2 cm in the warm summer of 2014. Furthermore, we measured a pronounced multi-year net subsidence of 9.3 ± 5.7 cm from spring 2013 to the end of summer 2017. Importantly, we observed a high spatial variability of subsidence of up to 6 cm across a sub-meter horizontal scale. In summer 2013, we accompanied our field measurements with Differential Synthetic Aperture Radar Interferometry (DInSAR) on repeat-pass TerraSAR-X (TSX) data from the summer of 2013 to detect summer thaw subsidence over the same study area. Interferometry was strongly affected by a fast phase ...