Thermal state of permafrost in the Central Andes (27–34° S)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract. The thermal state of permafrost in South America is poorly understood compared to other regions, largely due to a scarcity of in situ data. This study presents the first coordinated regional compilation of borehole temperature records from high-altitude mountain permafrost sites in the Central Andes (3500 to 5250 m; 27–34° S), providing a baseline assessment of ground thermal conditions. Measurements from 53 boreholes along a north–south transect at the Chilean–Argentine border reveal ground thermal characteristics similar to those in other mountain permafrost regions, including high spatial and temporal variability, correlations with altitude and slope aspect, and distinct thermal attributes of rock glaciers. These observations suggest that the ground thermal regime of the Central Andes is shaped by similar processes, a perspective that previously lacked data support. The high temporal variability observed in the short records (< 9 years) reflects short-term microclimatic fluctuations and topo-climatic attributes unique to the Andean cryosphere. These include hyper-arid conditions, intense solar radiation, limited vegetative cover and organic matter, less massive ice (except in rock glaciers), and mountain topography in a Southern Hemisphere location. The susceptibility of the area to regional climatic phenomena (such as Southern Annular Mode (SAM), El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO) and Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO)) suggests that long-term trends can only be determined from extended datasets spanning several decades. This study highlights the need for ongoing ground temperature monitoring and emphasizes the importance of collaboration between industry, governments and scientists to advance understanding of a key climate change indicator in a data-scarce region.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 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 teacher head, 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".