Circum-Arctic Map of the Yedoma Permafrost Domain

• Published in: Frontiers in Earth Science
• Main Authors: Jens Strauss, Sebastian Laboor, Lutz Schirrmeister, Alexander N. Fedorov, Daniel Fortier, Duane Froese, Matthias Fuchs, Frank Günther, Mikhail Grigoriev, Jennifer Harden, Gustaf Hugelius, Loeka L. Jongejans, Mikhail Kanevskiy, Alexander Kholodov, Viktor Kunitsky, Gleb Kraev, Anatoly Lozhkin, Elizaveta Rivkina, Yuri Shur, Christine Siegert, Valentin Spektor, Irina Streletskaya, Mathias Ulrich, Sergey Vartanyan, Alexandra Veremeeva, Katey Walter Anthony, Sebastian Wetterich, Nikita Zimov, Guido Grosse
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: Frontiers Media S.A. 2021
• Subjects: late Pleistocene; syngenetic permafrost; Beringia; Siberia; Alaska; Yukon; Science; Q; Arctic; Climate change; Ice; permafrost; Thermokarst
• Online Access: https://doi.org/10.3389/feart.2021.758360; https://doaj.org/article/837808cfa519472bbd62f36bf6dfebff

Ice-rich permafrost in the circum-Arctic and sub-Arctic (hereafter pan-Arctic), such as late Pleistocene Yedoma, are especially prone to degradation due to climate change or human activity. When Yedoma deposits thaw, large amounts of frozen organic matter and biogeochemically relevant elements return into current biogeochemical cycles. This mobilization of elements has local and global implications: increased thaw in thermokarst or thermal erosion settings enhances greenhouse gas fluxes from permafrost regions. In addition, this ice-rich ground is of special concern for infrastructure stability as the terrain surface settles along with thawing. Finally, understanding the distribution of the Yedoma domain area provides a window into the Pleistocene past and allows reconstruction of Ice Age environmental conditions and past mammoth-steppe landscapes. Therefore, a detailed assessment of the current pan-Arctic Yedoma coverage is of importance to estimate its potential contribution to permafrost-climate feedbacks, assess infrastructure vulnerabilities, and understand past environmental and permafrost dynamics. Building on previous mapping efforts, the objective of this paper is to compile the first digital pan-Arctic Yedoma map and spatial database of Yedoma coverage. Therefore, we 1) synthesized, analyzed, and digitized geological and stratigraphical maps allowing identification of Yedoma occurrence at all available scales, and 2) compiled field data and expert knowledge for creating Yedoma map confidence classes. We used GIS-techniques to vectorize maps and harmonize site information based on expert knowledge. We included a range of attributes for Yedoma areas based on lithological and stratigraphic information from the source maps and assigned three different confidence levels of the presence of Yedoma (confirmed, likely, or uncertain). Using a spatial buffer of 20 km around mapped Yedoma occurrences, we derived an extent of the Yedoma domain. Our result is a vector-based map of the current pan-Arctic Yedoma ...