Scale‐Dependent Influence of Permafrost on Riverbank Erosion Rates
-
1.
California Institute of Technology
Abstract
Whether permafrost systematically alters the rate of riverbank erosion is a fundamental geomorphic question with significant importance to infrastructure, water quality, and biogeochemistry of high-latitude watersheds. For over four decades, this question has remained unanswered due to a lack of data. Using remotely sensed imagery, we addressed this knowledge gap by quantifying riverbank erosion rates across the Arctic and subarctic. To compare these rates to non-permafrost rivers, we assembled a global data set of published riverbank erosion rates. We found that erosion rates in rivers influenced by permafrost are on average nine times lower than non-permafrost systems; erosion rate differences increase up to 40 times for the largest rivers. To test alternative hypotheses for the observed erosion rate difference, we examined differences in total water yield and erosional efficiency between these rivers and non-permafrost rivers. Neither of these factors nor differences in river sediment loads provided compelling alternative explanations, leading us to conclude that permafrost limits riverbank erosion rates. This conclusion was supported by field investigations of rates and patterns of erosion along three rivers flowing through discontinuous permafrost in Alaska. Our results show that permafrost limits maximum bank erosion rates on rivers with stream powers greater than 900 Wm−1. On smaller rivers, however, hydrology rather than thaw rate may be the dominant control on bank erosion. Our findings suggest that Arctic warming and hydrological changes should increase bank erosion rates on large rivers but may reduce rates on rivers with drainage areas less than a few thousand km2.
Copyright and License
© 2023. The Authors. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Acknowledgement
Primary funding for this research was provided by the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science Biological and Environmental Research Earth and Environmental Systems Sciences Division Early Career Award to J. Rowland, and the Regional and Global Model Analysis Program funded Interdisciplinary Research for Arctic Coastal Environments (InteRFACE) project awarded under contract Grant 89233218CNA000001 to Triad National Security, LLC (“Triad”). Additional funding was provided by Los Alamos National Laboratory Directed Research and Development for the work on Selawik River. Other funding sources for co-authors were provided by Caltech Terrestrial Hazards Observation and Reporting Center, Foster and Coco Stanback, the Linde Family, and the Resnick Sustainability Institute to Michael P. Lamb; National Science Foundation Awards 2127442 and 2031532; the National Defence Science and Engineering Graduate Fellowship for Madison M. Douglas and Preston C. Kemeny; and the Fannie and John Hertz Foundation Cohen/Jacobs and Stein Family Fellowship for Preston C. Kemeny. We thank the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Selawik National Wildlife Refuge for logistical support. Dana Brown, Mitchell Donovan, and Marc Van De Wiel provided data that supported the compilation of erosion rates. Logistical support was provided by Shawn Huffman, Alvin Attla, and Virgil Umphenour for work on the Koyukuk River. We thank Sheila Dufford, Clifford Adams, and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service for logistical support on the Yukon River. We thank the Koyukuk-hotana Athabascans, First Chief Norman Burgett, and the Huslia Tribal Council for land access and the USFWS–Koyukuk National Wildlife refuge for research permitting and logistical assistance. We thank Editor Amy East, reviewer Dongfeng Li, and an anonymous Associate Editor and reviewer for the time invested in providing constructive and valuable reviews of this manuscript.
Data Availability
All original data and software used in this manuscript have been archived at the DOE ESS-DIVE data portal (http://ess-dive.lbl.gov/) and are cited and referenced in the manuscript. Data sets include global compilation of published erosion, https://data.ess-dive.lbl.gov/view/doi:10.15485/1571181 (Rowland & Schwenk, 2019); binary channel masks of Arctic rivers analyzed, https://data.ess-dive.lbl.gov/datasets/doi:10.15485/1571525 (Rowland & Stauffer, 2019a), erosion, accretion, and planform metrics of arctic rivers, https://data.ess-dive.lbl.gov/datasets/doi:10.15485/1571527 (Rowland & Stauffer, 2019b); bank temperature measurements measured on Selawik and Koyukuk Rivers, https://data.ess-dive.lbl.gov/datasets/doi:10.15485/1922885, (Rowland et al., 2023); and observations and map of permafrost along the Koyukuk River, https://data.ess-dive.lbl.gov/datasets/doi:10.15485/1922517, (Schwenk et al., 2023). The rabpro software can be accessed at https://doi.org/10.21105/joss.04237, (Schwenk et al., 2022).
Files
| Name | Size | Download all |
|---|---|---|
|
md5:508f566f6d41c4eb1d77709e6eb24327
|
12.0 MB | Preview Download |
|
md5:ae911cee6af7a8d28d80db5ec152a09c
|
8.6 MB | Download |
Additional details
- ISSN
- 2169-9011
- United States Department of Energy
- DE‐AC02‐05CH11231
- Los Alamos National Laboratory
- National Science Foundation
- RISE-2127442
- National Science Foundation
- EAR-2031532
- Caltech groups
- Division of Geological and Planetary Sciences