Study: Wisconsin-Sized Alaskan Permafrost Is Thawing
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- Michael Rawlins and colleagues at the University of Massachusetts Amherst published the first study to model a Wisconsin-sized area of Alaska's North Slope at 1-kilometer grid resolution over 44 years (1980–2023), finding that runoff is increasing massively and the thaw season now extends into September and October.
- Arctic rivers deliver 11% of the world's river water to the Arctic Ocean, which holds just 1% of global ocean volume, and over 275 million tons of carbon is released as CO₂ annually from river-borne dissolved organic carbon (DOC).
- The active layer of permafrost has been deepening due to warming, flushing more ancient frozen carbon as DOC into rivers and ultimately the ocean, with the largest DOC increases emanating from flatter northwest Alaska where carbon has accumulated for tens of thousands of years.
- Rawlins' Permafrost Water Balance Model, refined over 25 years, ran for 10 continuous days on the Massachusetts Green High Performance Computing Center supercomputer to simulate daily river flows and coastal exports across the entire region.
- A 2024 companion modeling run of 22.45 million square kilometers of Arctic land projected up to 25% more runoff, 30% more subsurface runoff, and a progressively drier southern Arctic over the next 80 years.
- The Beaufort Sea coast is likely seeing altered salinity, biogeochemical processes, and food web relationships as a result, and the Beaufort Lagoon Ecosystems project is among stakeholders using the data to quantify what is flowing through coastal estuaries.
Why it matters: The study gives coastal Alaskan stakeholders, including the Beaufort Lagoon Ecosystems project, their first fine-grained quantitative picture of how thawing permafrost is reshaping freshwater and carbon delivery to the Arctic Ocean — with northwest Alaska identified as the hotspot where ancient carbon stores are most actively mobilizing into the climate system.
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