The world’s largest High Arctic lake responds rapidly to climate warming
Using a whole-watershed approach and a combination of historical, contemporary, modeled and paleolimnological datasets, we show that the High Arctic’s largest lake by volume (Lake Hazen) has succumbed to climate warming with only a ~1 °C relative increase in summer air temperatures. This warming dee...
Published in: | Nature Communications |
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Main Authors: | , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , |
Format: | Text |
Language: | English |
Published: |
Nature Publishing Group UK
2018
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Subjects: | |
Online Access: | http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5876346/ http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29599477 https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-018-03685-z |
Summary: | Using a whole-watershed approach and a combination of historical, contemporary, modeled and paleolimnological datasets, we show that the High Arctic’s largest lake by volume (Lake Hazen) has succumbed to climate warming with only a ~1 °C relative increase in summer air temperatures. This warming deepened the soil active layer and triggered large mass losses from the watershed’s glaciers, resulting in a ~10 times increase in delivery of glacial meltwaters, sediment, organic carbon and legacy contaminants to Lake Hazen, a >70% decrease in lake water residence time, and near certainty of summer ice-free conditions. Concomitantly, the community assemblage of diatom primary producers in the lake shifted dramatically with declining ice cover, from shoreline benthic to open-water planktonic species, and the physiological condition of the only fish species in the lake, Arctic Char, declined significantly. Collectively, these changes place Lake Hazen in a biogeochemical, limnological and ecological regime unprecedented within the past ~300 years. |
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