An Oak Ridge National Laboratory-led team is observing how thawing of permafrost, or frozen soil, affects the carbon cycle in the Alaskan Seward Peninsula. Trees, shrubs and grasses are creeping northward, and new lakes are appearing as permafrost thaws due to warming. Team members traveled to the peninsula several times in 2014 as part of the Next-Generation Ecosystem Experiments Arctic project to corroborate satellite and sensing data with field observations. They are using the information to improve the representation of ecological processes that drive the carbon cycle in climate models. In particular, they are developing specialized parameters for different types of Arctic vegetation to avoid “green sponges” in climate models, or the uniform modeling of diverse plant processes and their unique contributions to the carbon cycle, which can lead to over- or underestimating future greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere.
