Analysis of the subsea permafrost dynamics at the Arctic shelf accounting for climate change uncertainty during glacial cycles

Abstract

© 2020 SPIE The changes in the characteristics of submarine permafrost within the ocean shelf have been analyzed using a mathematical model describing the thermal state of the soil and supplemented with the salt diffusion equation. The model is complemented with reconstructions of climate changes at the Arctic shelf over the past 400 thousand years with two combinations of air temperature and sea level reconstructions. The estimates of the subsea permafrost sensitivity to the uncertainty of paleoclimatic reconstructions of air temperature and ocean level have been obtained. The time scales of the Arctic shelf submarine permafrost response to climate change in the glacial cycles have been estimated. The temporal scale of the propagation of the thermal signal in the permafrost layer of the shelf sediment amounted to 4-12 thousand years.