Thermokarst disturbance responses to climate change across the circumpolar permafrost regions from 1990 to 2023

Abstract

Warming climate drives permafrost degradation and forms serious thermokarst disturbances, with significant impacts on geomorphology, hydrology, and ecological processes. However, the long-term monitoring of thermokarst disturbances and their next development remains a challenge across the circumpolar permafrost regions. Here, we calculate six spectral indices from Landsat images to represent greenness, wetness, and brightness, quantifying the spatiotemporal characteristics of thermokarst landscape dynamics and further revealing their development with a warming climate. Additionally, DNMI, NDWI, and NDVI are selected to verify the occurrence and severity of retrogressive thaw slumps, thermokarst lake expansion, and drainage by the LandTrendr algorithm on the Google Earth Engine platform. Three major types of thermokarst events show a consistent disturbance year, correlating with the summer temperature increase point around 2000. Their correlation analysis also reveals that the subsequent landscape development of thermokarst disturbances is related to the warming context, showing vegetation greening and soil wetting trends. These findings highlight the dynamic characteristics of thermokarst disturbances from 1990 to 2023, providing a comprehensive understanding of thermokarst development under a changing climate.

Keywords

Thermokarst landscape / Climate change / Spectral indices / Dynamic disturbances / Landscape development

CRediT authorship contribution statement

Ya Liu: Writing - original draft, Visualization, Methodology, Formal analysis. Haijun Qiu: Writing - review & editing, Supervi-sion, Project administration, Funding acquisition, Conceptualiza-tion. Ninglian Wang: Writing - review & editing, Validation, Supervision, Conceptualization. Dongdong Yang: Visualization, Validation, Supervision. Kailiang Zhao: Visualization, Formal anal-ysis. Guoqing Yang: Software, Methodology. Wenchao Huangfu: Supervision, Formal analysis. Wanqi Luo: Writing - review & edit-ing, Validation.

Data availability

The Landsat imagery and climate monthly dataset are available from Google Earth Engine (https://developers.google.cn/earth-engine/datasets). The thermokarst disturbances are available at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.13346126. The LandTrendr algorithm is available at https://emapr.github.io/LT-GEE. The codes for spectral indices calculation, Theil-Sen trend and partial correlation analyses are available from the corresponding author by request.

Declaration of competing interest

The authors declare that they have no known competing finan-cial interests or personal relationsh ips that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Acknowledgments

This work was funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. 42301090 and 42471083), China Postdoctoral Science Foundation (Grant No. 2022M722564), and Key Research and Development Program of Shaanxi (2024SF-YBXM-669).

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