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Exploring ice’s role in bank migration on the Canning River, AK
Josie Arcuri,
(she/her/hers),University of Colorado Boulder Boulder Colorado, United States. Josephine.Arcuri@colorado.edu
Icy river dynamics set the rate of material exchange between arctic surface water and their floodplains. As they migrate across arctic landscapes, icy rivers limit soil organic carbon’s (SOC) residence time by transferring some river bank material to the fluvial network. In this way, limit SOC decomposition in a deepening permafrost active layer and modulate the landscape-wide carbon budget. Concurrently, arctic rivers are occupied by river ice for a significant portion of the hydrograph, which is known to affect their potential to transport sediment. However, we do not know how river ice impacts riverbank migration through permafrost, especially in small arctic watersheds, like the Canning Rivers on Alaska's North Slope. We aim to quantify how much SOC the Canning River removes from its floodplain over a typical year by differencing satellite-collected images. Based on initial results, the Canning seems to migrate much less than expected over the last two decades. We will use similar methods to identify the annual cycles of river ice occurrence on the Canning, in comparison to locations of actual and expected river bank migration. Expected river bank migration will be predicted from classical river bank migration models based on non permafrost rivers. We hypothesize that models of bank migration based on non permafrost rivers over predict fluvial erosion into permafrost banks, and that river ice occurrence will correlate with that overprediction. We can also make use of this work in predicting the future contribution of the Canning river and other arctic landscapes to the global carbon budget. This work has immediate importance for people who traverse arctic landscapes and depend on their resources, but especially those who live there. Arctic landscape response to climate change is just as much a story about the loss of place and vanishing resources as it is about a dynamic earth system.
