Lindborg, Tobias
- Department of Forest Ecology and Management, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences
- Swedish Nuclear Fuel and Waste Management Co (SKB)
Research article2023Peer reviewedOpen access
Rydberg, Johan; Lindborg, Tobias; Lidman, Fredrik; Trojbom, Mats; Berglund, Sten; Lindborg, Emma; Kautsky, Ulrik; Laudon, Hjalmar
There is an increased awareness that the biogeochemical cycling at high latitudes will be affected by a changing climate. However, because biogeochemical studies most often focus on a limited number of elements (i.e., C, P and N) we lack baseline conditions for many elements. In this work, we present a 42-element mass-balance budget for lake dominated catchment in West Greenland. By combining site specific concentration data from various catchment compartments (precipitation, active layer soils, groundwater, permafrost, lake water, lake sediments and biota) with catchment geometries and hydrological fluxes from a distributed hydrological model we have assessed present-day mobilization, transport and accumulation of a whole suite of elements with different biogeochemical behavior. Our study shows that, under the cold and dry conditions that prevails close to the inland ice-sheet: i) eolian processes are important for the transport of elements associated with mineral particles (e.g., Al, Ti, Si), and that these elements tend to accumulate in the lake sediment, ii) that even if weathering rates are slowed down by the dry and cold climate, weathering in terrestrial soils is an important source for many elements (e.g., lanthanides), iii) that the cold and dry conditions results in an accumulation of elements supplied by wet deposition (e.g., halogens) in both terrestrial soils and the lake-water column, and iv) that lead and sulfur from legacy pollution are currently being released from the terrestrial system. All these processes are affected by the climate, and we can therefore expect that the cycling of the majority of the 42 studied elements will change in the future. However, it is not always possible to predict the direction of this change, which shows that more multi-element biogeochemical studies are needed to increase our understanding of the consequences of a changing climate for the Arctic environment.
Multi element; Mass-balance budget; Whole catchment; Dry periglacial landscape; Terrestrial; Aquatic
CATENA
2023, Volume: 231, article number: 107311Publisher: ELSEVIER
SDG13 Climate action
Geosciences, Multidisciplinary
Oceanography, Hydrology, Water Resources
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.catena.2023.107311
https://res.slu.se/id/publ/123460