About the project
Peatlands in the permafrost region contain approximately 300 Gigatons of carbon, which is about a third of the total carbon stored in permafrost. These permafrost peatlands are almost entirely located near the southern border of the permafrost region and have a so-called "warm” permafrost. The vast majority is expected to thaw even if climate mitigation is successful and the 2°C target is reached, likely releasing some of the stored carbon to the atmosphere as greenhouse gases, i.e. carbon dioxide and methane. After permafrost has disappeared, however, new peat can form and peatlands can start sequestering carbon from the atmosphere, thus reducing atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations.
Depending on which effect dominates, thawing permafrost peatlands may either complicate or support reaching and maintaining the 2°C target. To plan mitigation pathways and assess the sustainability of societal development, it is critical to account for greenhouse gas emissions from peatlands with and without permafrost. However, reliable future projections do not exist, and many of the governing processes are not even understood yet, calling for basic research to overcome this problem.
The largest areas of peatland permafrost are located in Russia, Canada and Alaska, but also in Norway we find sizeable permafrost peatlands in Finnmark in the north of the country. These have been thawing for decades and permafrost will completely disappear from most of them in the next decades. At these Norwegian sites, we can observe already now what may happen in the much larger permafrost peatlands worldwide when the climate warms further.
In PEAT-THAW, we will systematically take samples from permafrost peatlands in Norway and analyze them in laboratory experiments at the Soil and Water Science Section at the Norwegian University of Life Sciences in Ås. We will in particular conduct “incubation experiments” in which we expose the sample material to controlled temperature and moisture conditions and measure the resulting emissions of carbon dioxide and methane. In addition, we will exploit air photos taken several decades ago and newer drone aerial imagery taken with DroneLab@UiO to plan the sampling locations.
Objectives
In the PEAT-THAW-project, our main goal is to better understand the carbon cycle of thawing permafrost peatlands which represent a major global carbon reservoir that is currently not represented in Earth System Model simulations on the future climate.
We will in particular try to answer the question whether these sensitive ecosystems could become a major source of greenhouse gases in a future warmer world. The work is designed to compile better numerical models of the permafrost carbon cycle which can be used for improved future projections of greenhouse gas emissions.
Background
The Department of Geosciences has conducted research on permafrost peatlands in Northern Norway for more than ten years, with several research projects (e.g. PermaNor, BioGov) funded by the Research Council of Norway. In this research work, we show that about half of the permafrost peatlands in Finnmark have disappeared in the last 60 years (Borge et al., 2017).
At the moment, we are investigating the impact of permafrost thaw on the carbon cycle of these areas within the research at Centre of Biogeochemistry in the Anthropocene. The PEAT-THAW project is part of the Faculty of Mathematics and Natural Sciences’ initiative on sustainability research. One PhD student will work full time on the project.
Financing
The project name is "PEAT-THAW: Thawing Permafrost Peatlands – Carbon Source or Sink in a +2°C World?", and is a part of the The Faculty of Mathematics and Natural Sciences’, University of Oslo' initiative on sustainability research. The project is funded for 3 years. The project is led by Sebastian Westermann.
The project starts in August 2023 and will last until 2026.
Cooperation
The project is part of the Centre for Biogeochemistry in the Anthropocene (CBA) and the project is carried out in close collaboration with the Soil and Water Science Section at the Norwegian University of Life Sciences. PEAT-THAW is based on collaboration with researchers from the Dept of Geosciences, the Dept of Biosciences and the Norwegian Institute for Water Research, through the BioGov project.
The collaborating partners in PEAT-THAW some from:
- Centre for Biogeochemistry in the Anthropocene (CBA)
- Department of Geosciences, University of Oslo
- Department of Biosciences, University of Oslo
- Norwegian University of Life Sciences (NMBU)
- Norwegian Institute for Water Research
Tools / infrastructure
This project benefits from the infrastructure 'The Drone Infrastructure Lab' at Department of Geosciences, and the laboratores at the Soil and Water Science Section at the Norwegian University of Life Sciences, where the experiments are carried out.
Visit the webpages for The Drone Infrastructure Lab
Visit the webpages for the Soil and Water Science Section, NMBU