Researchers say widespread lake drainage on tundra another sign of climate change
Scientists say a year in which almost 200 tundra lakes drained away could point to what’s in store for Canada’s North.
Between 2017 and 2018, 192 lakes in northwest Alaska lost at least a quarter of their area as the permafrost that held them melted. Canada has plenty of the same kind of landscape and can likely expect the same effects, said Claude Duguay, a University of Waterloo researcher and co-author of a new paper in the journal Cryosphere.
“It’s pretty widespread,” he said.
Duguay and his colleagues examined some of the countless small, shallow lakes that dot the tundra of Alaska’s Seward Peninsula. Many have been stable for millennia while others wax and wane depending on the stability of the permafrost that blocks water from draining both underneath and along the shoreline.