Mineral-bound organic carbon exposed by hillslope thermokarst terrain: case study in Cape Bounty, Canadian High Arctic
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract. Arctic landscapes could add 55–230 Pg of carbon (in CO2 equivalent) to the atmosphere, through CO2 and CH4 emissions, by the end of this century. These estimates could be quantified more accurately by constraining the contribution of rapid thawing processes such as thermokarst landscapes to permafrost carbon loss, and by investigating the exposed organic carbon (OC) interacting with mineral surfaces or metallic cations, i.e., the nature of these interactions and what controls their relative abundance. Here, we investigate two contrasted types of hillslope thermokarst landscapes: an Active Layer Detachment (ALD) which is a one-time event, and a Retrogressive Thaw Slump (RTS) which repeats annually during summer months in the Cape Bounty Arctic Watershed Observatory (Melville Island, Canada). We analyzed mineralogy, total and soluble element concentrations, total OC and mineral-OC interactions within the headwalls of both disturbances, and within corresponding undisturbed profiles. Our results show that OC stabilized by chemical bonds account for 13 ± 5 % of total OC in the form of organo-metallic complexes and up to 6 ± 2 % associated with poorly crystalline iron oxides. If we add the mechanisms of physical protection of particulate organic matter in aggregates and larger molecules stabilized by chemical bonds, we reach 64 ± 10 % of the total OC being stabilized. Importantly, we observe a decrease in the proportion of mineral-bound OC in the deeper layers exposed by the retrogressive thaw slump: the proportion of organo-metallic complexes drops from ~18 % in surface samples to ~1 % in the deepest samples. These results therefore suggest that the OC exposed by thermokarst disturbances at Cape Bounty is protected by interactions with minerals to a certain extent, but that deep thaw features could expose OC more readily accessible to degradation.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".