Active layer thickness and permafrost area projections for the 21st century
Peng, Xiaoqing; Zhang, Tingjun; Frauenfeld, Oliver W.; Mu, Cuicui; Wang, Kang; Wu, Xiaodong; Guo, Donglin; Luo, Jing; Hjort, Jan; Karjalainen, Olli; Luoto, Miska (2023-07-27)
Peng, X., Zhang, T., Frauenfeld, O. W., Mu, C., Wang, K., Wu, X., et al. (2023). Active layer thickness and permafrost area projections for the 21st century. Earth's Future, 11, e2023EF003573. https://doi.org/10.1029/2023EF003573
© 2023 The Authors. Earth's Future published by Wiley Periodicals LLC on behalf of American Geophysical Union. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License, which permits use and distribution in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is non-commercial and no modifications or adaptations are made.
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/
https://urn.fi/URN:NBN:fi-fe20230927137636
Tiivistelmä
Abstract
Permafrost warming leads to greenhouse gas release to the atmosphere, resulting in a positive feedback to climate change. Earth >system models indicate that more than 80% of the near-surface permafrost is projected to disappear by the end of this century, but with a high degree of uncertainty. Here, we apply the Stefan solution to estimate permafrost degradation under future emission scenarios. We find that the most severe future scenario is likely to lead to only a 14% decrease in area extent of the near-surface permafrost at 3.5 m depth, and an area extent decrease of 1.3% at a depth of 6.0 m. Relative to active layer thickness increases from historical simulations, we find a less than 30% deepening for most permafrost regions by the end of this century. These results imply that the Stefan solution provides near-surface permafrost area extent degradation estimates that are substantially lower than directly projected by models.
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