EHAWC · European high arctic wetland change
FP6 — Marie Curie Actions (Human Resources and Mobility)
- Duration
- 2007-05-01 → 2009-04-30
- EU contribution
- €160,180
- Participants
- 1
- Scheme
- IIF
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Results in brief
Final Activity Report Summary - EHAWC (European high arctic wetland change)
Arctic wetlands are active in carbon and hydrological cycles and are both climatically sensitive ecosystems as well as important archives of past environmental conditions. To assess the carbon sequestration and hydrological sensitivity of High Arctic mires to climate variation, peat deposits from Svalbard, Norway were studied to determine their response to past climate. Our goal, to quantify carbon accumulation and determine surface wetness histories, is motivated by the question of whether High Arctic mires have been dynamic and sensitive to past climate variation. Peat cores and surface samples were collected in 2007 and 2008 at several low-elevation sites from the inner fjords of west-central Spitsbergen between 78 and 79N. Decadally-resolved indicators of peat decomposition together with high-resolution carbon assays and radiocarbon dating reveal that Arctic mires in Svalbard are highly sensitive to perturbation. Patterns in the rate of carbon accumulation included abrupt slowdowns/near-shutdowns of carbon accumulation that have persisted for centuries to surprisingly high sustained rates - as high as Eurasian sites much further south. For example, 6000-year old organic deposits at 79N show slowdown in carbon sequestration contemporaneous with the close of Holocene Thermal Maximum conditions, whereas, 1500-year-old deposits at 78N show renewed sequestration around AD 1500 following a multi-centennial hiatus. This highly-sensitive carbon sequestration response to past warming was shown to be strongly mediated by hydrological conditions, suggesting that future response in a warmer Arctic will have a strong reliance on the fate of local water and changes in the amount and seasonality of precipitation.
Data: CORDIS, © European Union
Project objective
Today's Arctic is undergoing changes that are historically unprecedented, and future changes over the next century are expected to be even greater. Arctic wetlands are active in carbon and hydrological cycles, and are both climatically sensitive modern ecosystems and important archives of past environmental conditions.A Marie Curie IIF research program is proposed to investigate High Arctic wetland sensitivity to climate variation using palaeoenvironmental tools. Past hydrological change and carbon accumulation patterns will be investigated explicitly at two-time scales - the recent past of the last 200 - 300 years and total Holocene history (the last 12,000 years).High Arctic wetland sites on the Svalbard Archipeligo, Norway will be studied with a cross-disciplinary approach that utilizes geological, biological, and biogeochemical methods. State-of-the-art chronological methods to be employed include combination of 14C-AMS measurement of anthropogenic bomb carbon, Holocene radiocarbon, and tephrochronology using newly developed Bayesian statistical methods for age modeling. Palaeohydrology will be studied using remains of soil microfauna (testate amoebae) and transfer-function quantitative reconstructions.The direct inter-comparison of wetland carbon accumulation rates with hydrological reconstructions will provide information about High Arctic ecosystem response to climate. Greater understanding of relationships between environment and ecosystem dynamics over recent-past and millennial-scale time sc ales in the High Arctic is timely owing to existing knowledge gaps regarding Arctic wetlands as well as present rapid Arctic change.Results of this research will provide new information for understudied Arctic ecosystems and underutilised palaeoenvironmental records that will be useful to climatologists, hydrologists, wetland biologists, and the general Arctic system science community.
Original text from CORDIS.
Participants
- QUEEN'S UNIVERSITY BELFAST · BELFASTCoordinatorUnited Kingdom
Links
Data: CORDIS, © European Union