Permafrost Laboratory

Work on thermokarst lakes by Guido Grosse and colleagues Katey Walter Anthony and Melanie Engram is being featured in NASA's annual outreach publication "Sensing our Planet", which highlights current NASA Earth Science Research. The article "Leaking Lakes" was published in November 2012 and can be found here.

A new report on thawing permafrost "Policy Implications of Warming Permafrost" was just released with Vladimir Romanovsky as one of the contributing authors. Read the summary here or download the full report from the link below.

A new article published in Nature Geoscience led by Dr. Katey Walter Anthony and co-authored by Dr. Guido Grosse from the GI Permafrost Lab highlights findings of geologic methane seepage in zones of Arctic permafrost thaw and receding glaciers. Results indicate that in a warmer future climate, deep geologic methane sources currently trapped under a Cryosphere cap may increasingly contribute to the greenhouse gas budget of the Earth's atmosphere as this cap is degrading.

A recent paper, Dr. Vladimir Romanovsky is co-author, details seabed geoelectric field observations of ice-rich sea-bed permafrost and estimate of the degradation rate. Sea-bed permafrost like permafrost on land can hold substantial amounts of methane, a very potent greenhouse gas. Degradation of sea-bed permafrost on the shallow continental shelves of the coastal seas of the Arctic Ocean could 'ignite' a substantially positive feedback loop with the atmosphere-land-ocean systems in the Arctic with global impact. The paper is published in JGR - Earth Surface, v.