Permafrost degradation and thermokarst dynamics in the western Canadian and Alaskan Arctic
Research Topic
Arctic Permafrost regions are especially sensitive to climate variations and their dynamics can have a significant control on the global environmental and climatic system. Influenced by degrading permafrost, Holocene landscape dynamics are recorded by the development of thermokarst. The accumulated sediments in those thaw lakes are valuable environmental archives whose records of past processes in the water body and its catchment area are compared with modern observed processes.
The PhD project will decipher thermokarst lake sediment archives from the Alaska Coastal Plain and the Canadian Yukon Coastal Plain by using a multidisciplinary research approach consisting of geochronology, sedimentology, biogeochemistry, isotope geochemistry, paleoecology and hydrochemistry methods. The main objective is to reconstruct the paleoenvironment in the vicinity of the Laurentian Ice Sheet in the western North America during the late Glacial and Holocene. Thereby, past environmental dynamics will be related to modern and predicted future processes and examined in connection with local, regional and global environmental changes.
Cooperations
German Partners
- Friedrich Schiller University Jena, Institut für Geologie und Mineralogie (Peter Frenzel)
International Partners
- University of Cologne, Institut für Geologie und Mineralogie (Martin Melles, Janet Rethemeyer)
- McGill University, Department of Geography, Montréal, Canada (Wayne Pollard)
- University of Alaska Fairbanks, Water and Environmental Research Center, Fairbanks, Alaska, United States of America (Katey Walter Anthony, Guido Grosse)
- Institute of Archaeology and Ethnography SB RAS, Novosibirsk, Russia (Natalia Rudaya
Funding
Postgraduate scholarship of University of Potsdam
