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Journal Article

Emerging dominance of summer rainfall driving High Arctic terrestrial-aquatic connectivity

Authors

Beel,  Casey
External Organizations;

/persons/resource/jheslop

Heslop,  Joanne
3.7 Geomicrobiology, 3.0 Geochemistry, Departments, GFZ Publication Database, Deutsches GeoForschungsZentrum;

Orwin,  John
External Organizations;

Pope,  Michael
External Organizations;

Schevers,  Amanda
External Organizations;

Hung,  Jacqueline
External Organizations;

Lafreniere,  Melissa
External Organizations;

Lamoureux,  Scott
External Organizations;

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Fulltext (public)

5003543.pdf
(Publisher version), 2MB

Supplementary Material (public)
There is no public supplementary material available
Citation

Beel, C., Heslop, J., Orwin, J., Pope, M., Schevers, A., Hung, J., Lafreniere, M., Lamoureux, S. (2021): Emerging dominance of summer rainfall driving High Arctic terrestrial-aquatic connectivity. - Nature Communications, 12, 1448.
https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-021-21759-3


Cite as: https://gfzpublic.gfz-potsdam.de/pubman/item/item_5003543
Abstract
Hydrological transformations induced by climate warming are causing Arctic annual fluvial energy to shift from skewed (snowmelt-dominated) to multimodal (snowmelt- and rainfall-dominated) distributions. We integrated decade-long hydrometeorological and biogeochemical data from the High Arctic to show that shifts in the timing and magnitude of annual discharge patterns and stream power budgets are causing Arctic material transfer regimes to undergo fundamental changes. Increased late summer rainfall enhanced terrestrial-aquatic connectivity for dissolved and particulate material fluxes. Permafrost disturbances (<3% of the watersheds’ areal extent) reduced watershed-scale dissolved organic carbon export, offsetting concurrent increased export in undisturbed watersheds. To overcome the watersheds’ buffering capacity for transferring particulate material (30 ± 9 Watt), rainfall events had to increase by an order of magnitude, indicating the landscape is primed for accelerated geomorphological change when future rainfall magnitudes and consequent pluvial responses exceed the current buffering capacity of the terrestrial-aquatic continuum.