On October 24th, Pascale discusses a recent article published by members of the Permafrost Carbon Network in Nature Communications on CO2 emissions from the ground during the freezing season in circumpolar permafrost areas.
We just returned from collecting field data for a follow-up study aimed at better understanding the factors controlling soil microbial respiration during the cold season.
On October 15th 2019, while doing field work in the Yukon, Pascale spoke with Radio-Canada’s Phare Ouest host, Marie Villeneuve, about her permafrost research in the Yukon and the recent $5.5 M funding received by PermafrostNet.
Canada’s Minister of Environment and Climate Change, the Honourable Catherine McKenna, has announced the recipient projects of the highly competitive “Advancing Climate Change Science in Canada” initiative.
Project description: High latitude cold regions, including Arctic and northern areas of Canada, are warming more than twice as fast as the rest of the planet, with the greatest warming occurring during the winter. Canada’s temperate to subarctic wetlands and permafrost peatlands hold large stores of carbon which are susceptible to loss under future climate warming scenarios. Therefore, understanding the factors which regulate the processes controlling greenhouse gas emissions during the non-growing season is critical for predicting the fate of these vulnerable carbon stocks and for creating climate adaptation and mitigation strategies. With a focus on these critical ecosystems, the project brings together Canadian leaders from multiple disciplines from across universities with federal government scientists and policy makers to determine the drivers of non-growing season carbon cycling, develop process-based environmental models, and estimate CO2 emissions. In doing so, the project will address the knowledge gaps on emissions to provide data and tools to evaluate the impact of winter warming mitigation in controlling carbon losses from pan-Canadian wetland ecosystems.
Graduated lab member Emma Ciric continues to work with permafrost as she pursues her academic career. Emma is working on her M.Sc. at the University of Algarve, in Portugal, and is completing her thesis research in collaboration with Dr. Andrew Hodson from UNIS, in Svalbard. She sent us some quick news and pictures: ”I moved to Svalbard in January 2019 and will live here until September 2019 to
complete my Master’s thesis research on methane escape features in permafrost. I’ve been collecting water samples from around central Spitsbergen and will compare them to geographical features using GIS. ”