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Studies in recent decades have shown strong evidence of physical and biological changes in the Arctic tundra, largely in response to rapid rates of warming. Given the important implications of these changes for ecosystem services, hydrology, surface energy balance, carbon budgets, and climate feedbacks, research on the trends and patterns of these changes is becoming increasingly important and can help better constrain estimates of local, regional, and global impacts as well as inform mitigation and adaptation strategies. Despite this great need, scientific understanding of tundra ecology and change remains limited, largely due to the inaccessibility of this region and less intensive studies compared to other terrestrial biomes. A synthesis of existing datasets from past field studies can make field data more accessible and open up possibilities for collaborative research as well as for investigating and informing future studies. Here, we synthesize field datasets of vegetation and active-layer properties from the Alaskan tundra, one of the most well-studied tundra regions. Given the potentially increasing intensive fire regimes in the tundra, fire history and severity attributes have been added to data points where available. The resulting database is a resource that future investigators can employ to analyze spatial and temporal patterns in soil, vegetation, and fire disturbance-related environmental variables across the Alaskan tundra. This database, titled the Synthesized Alaskan Tundra Field Database (SATFiD), can be accessed at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory Distributed Active Archive Center (ORNL DAAC) for Biogeochemical Dynamics (Chen et al., 2023: 10.3334/ORNLDAAC/2177). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cryopeg brines are isolated volumes of hypersaline water in subzero permafrost. The cryopeg system at Utqiaġvik, Alaska, is estimated to date back to 40 ka BP or earlier, a remnant of a late Pleistocene Ocean. Surprisingly, the cryopeg brines contain high concentrations of organic carbon, including extracellular polysaccharides, and high densities of bacteria. How can these physiologically extreme, old, and geologically isolated systems support such an ecosystem? This study addresses this question by examining the energetics of the Utqiaġvik cryopeg brine ecosystem. Using literature-derived assumptions and new measurements on archived borehole materials, we first estimated the quantity of organic carbon when the system formed. We then considered two bacterial growth trajectories to calculate the lower and upper bounds of the cellspecific metabolic rate of these communities. These bounds represent the first community estimates of metabolic rate in a subzero hypersaline environment. To assess the plausibility of the different growth trajectories, we developed a model of the organic carbon cycle and applied it to three borehole scenarios. We also used dissolved inorganic carbon and nitrogen measurements to independently estimate the metabolic rate. The model reconstructs the growth trajectory of the microbial community and predicts the present-day cell density and organic carbon content. Model input included measured rates of the in-situ enzymatic conversion of particulate to dissolved organic carbon under subzero brine conditions. A sensitivity analysis of model parameters was performed, revealing an interplay between growth rate, cell-specific metabolic rate, and extracellular enzyme activity. This approach allowed us to identify plausible growth trajectories consistent with the observed bacterial densities in the cryopeg brines. We found that the cell-specific metabolic rate in this system is relatively high compared to marine sediments. We attribute this finding to the need to invest energy in the production of extracellular enzymes, for generating bioavailable carbon from particulate organic carbon, and the production of extracellular polysaccharides for cryoprotection and osmoprotection. These results may be relevant to other isolated systems in the polar regions of Earth and to possible ice-bound brines on worlds such as Europa, Enceladus, and Mars. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent studies have observed high methane concentrations in runoff water and the ambient air at various glacier sites, including the Greenland Ice Sheet, the glacier forefield in Svalbard, and the ice cap in Iceland. This study extends these findings to smaller mountain glaciers in Alaska. Methane and carbon dioxide concentrations in the ambient air near the meltwater outlet, fluxes of these gases at the surface of runoff water and riverbank sediments, and dissolved methane content in the runoff water were measured at four glaciers. Three of the four glaciers showed conspicuous signals of methane emissions from runoff water, with the Castner Glacier terminus exhibiting a methane concentration three times higher than background levels, along with elevated dissolved methane levels in the runoff water. This study marks the detection of significant methane emissions from small mountain glacier runoff, contributing to the understanding that mountain glaciers also release methane into the atmosphere., (© 2024. The Author(s).)