Climate change will enhance the process of methane runoff from permafrost to Arctic lakes through groundwater.
Climate change will enhance the process of methane runoff from permafrost to Arctic lakes through groundwater. Groundwaters that circulate through the subsoil as a result of the melting permafrost can transport carbon dioxide and methane —gases with a strong greenhouse effect— to Arctic lakes and this increases the effects of climate change. This process of transporting gases to the lakes, which culminates with their emission into the atmosphere, is now quantified for the first time in a paper published in the journal Nature Communications . The study was led by Carolina Olid, lecturer at the Faculty of Earth Sciences and member of the Geomodels Research Institute of the UB. Researchers Jordi Garcia-Orellana, Valentí Rodellas, Marc Diego-Feliu and Aaron Alorda-Kleinglass, from the Department of Physics (UAB) and the Institute of Environmental Science and Technology (ICTA-UAB); Gerard Rocher-Ros and Jan Karlsson (Umeå University, Sweden) and David Bastviken (Linköping University, Sweden) also participate in the study. Permafrost is the soil that remains frozen in different parts of the planet, such as the Arctic and Antarctica, as well as in the high mountains and high plateaus around the world. According to this study, climate change will enhance the process of methane runoff from permafrost to Arctic lakes through groundwater, which is why it is important to include this process in climate prediction models, as stated by Carolina Olid, first author of the study and member of the Department of Earth and Ocean Dynamics of the UB.
