Changing Permafrost in the Arctic and its Global Effects in the 21st Century: EU project launch of “PAGE21"

What happens when the vast amounts of carbon stored in Arctic soils are released into the atmosphere? This is the central question of a newly launched EU project named "PAGE21" which brings together field researchers, operators of long-term observatories and modellers from 18 partner institutions. Among them: Dr. Stefan Hagemann from the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology (MPI-M) and Prof. Dr. Lars Kutzbach from the Institute for Soil Science at the University of Hamburg. Together with the project partners, both of them aim at significantly improving the understanding of the development and feedbacks of permafrost regions under a changing climate.

 

About 50 % of the underground organic carbon occurring worldwide is found in Northern permafrost regions - and permafrost is already thawing and releasing greenhouse gases in most parts of the Arctic due to global warming. Although many of the mechanisms for release are in themselves fundamentally understood, the available data necessary for the quantification of single processes is sparse. Field researchers within PAGE21 will provide remedy here.

 

These data sets gained from field measurements are essential for the improvement of global climate models and thus for providing more reliable predictions of future global climate change. Today's global models are frequently inaccurate because the permafrost regions, with all their feedback mechanisms, are under-represented. MPI-M's Dr. Stefan Hagemann and his research group "Terrestrial Hydrology" will address this problem: "We will work on a better representation of permafrost region processes in land-surface modules of global climate models with respect to observed soil thermal profiles, soil water balances, carbon reservoirs and fluxes. In cooperation with Dr. Christian Beer from the "Biogeochemical Model-Data Integration" group of the Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry (MPI-BGC), the specific research focus within PAGE21 will be the modeling of thermokarst processes. Work at MPI-M will focus on the physical part of thermokarst while the biogeochemical part will be considered at MPI-BGC."

 

The CliSAP research group "Regional Hydrology in Terrestrial Systems" led by Prof. Dr. Lars Kutzbach will contribute to the observational part of the PAGE21 project. They will measure the carbon and nitrogen fluxes in the Arctic permafrost and will study how changes in these fluxes affect the ecosystem, the soils and finally our climate.

 

The EU project PAGE21 stands for "Changing Permafrost in the Arctic and its Global Effects in the 21st Century" and is running for four years. It is led by Prof. Dr. Hans-Wolfgang Hubberten of the Research Unit Potsdam of the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research in the Helmholtz Association.

 

(Photo of permafrost by Hans-Wolfgang Hubberten, AWI)

 

 

Contact

 

Dr. Stefan Hagemann

Max Planck Institute for Meteorology

Phone. +49 (0)40 41173 101

Email

 

 

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