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Rapidly changing climate is disrupting the High Arctic's water systems. As tracers of hydrological processes, stable water isotopes can be used for high quality monitoring of Arctic waters to better reconstruct past changes and assess future environmental threats. However, logistical challenges typically limit the length and scope of isotopic monitoring in High Arctic landscapes. Here, we present a comprehensive isotopic survey of 535 water samples taken in 2018 and 2019 of the lakes and other surface waters of the periglacial Pituffik Peninsula in far northwest Greenland. The δ18O, δ2H, and deuterium‐excess values of these samples, representing 196 unique sites, grant unprecedented insight into the environmental drivers of the regional hydrology and water isotopic variability. We find that the spatial variability of lake water isotopes can best be explained through evaporation and the hydrological ability of a lake to replace evaporative water losses with precipitation and snowmelt. Temporally, summer‐long evaporation can drive lake water isotopes beyond the isotopic range observed in precipitation, and wide interannual changes in lake water isotopes reflect annual weather differences that influenced evaporation. Following this, water isotope samples taken at individual times or sites in similar periglacial landscapes may have limited regional representativeness, and increasing the spatiotemporal extent of isotopic sampling is critical to producing accurate and informative High Arctic paleoclimate reconstructions. Overall, our survey highlights the diversity of isotopic compositions in Pituffik surface waters, and our complete isotopic and geospatial database provides a strong foundation for future researchers to study hydrological changes at Pituffik and across the Arctic.
Rapidly changing climate is disrupting the High Arctic's water systems. As tracers of hydrological processes, stable water isotopes can be used for high quality monitoring of Arctic waters to better reconstruct past changes and assess future environmental threats. However, logistical challenges typically limit the length and scope of isotopic monitoring in High Arctic landscapes. Here, we present a comprehensive isotopic survey of 535 water samples taken in 2018 and 2019 of the lakes and other surface waters of the periglacial Pituffik Peninsula in far northwest Greenland. The δ18O, δ2H, and deuterium‐excess values of these samples, representing 196 unique sites, grant unprecedented insight into the environmental drivers of the regional hydrology and water isotopic variability. We find that the spatial variability of lake water isotopes can best be explained through evaporation and the hydrological ability of a lake to replace evaporative water losses with precipitation and snowmelt. Temporally, summer‐long evaporation can drive lake water isotopes beyond the isotopic range observed in precipitation, and wide interannual changes in lake water isotopes reflect annual weather differences that influenced evaporation. Following this, water isotope samples taken at individual times or sites in similar periglacial landscapes may have limited regional representativeness, and increasing the spatiotemporal extent of isotopic sampling is critical to producing accurate and informative High Arctic paleoclimate reconstructions. Overall, our survey highlights the diversity of isotopic compositions in Pituffik surface waters, and our complete isotopic and geospatial database provides a strong foundation for future researchers to study hydrological changes at Pituffik and across the Arctic.
It is generally accepted that a weakening of the North Atlantic thermohaline circulation caused the Younger Dryas cooling. Although the role of seasonality was emphasized previously, this aspect is rarely considered yet, and it remains elusive how this impacted hydroclimate during winters and summers across Central Europe. Here, we coupled biomarker-based δ18O and δ2H from Bergsee in southern Germany to reconstruct deuterium excess as a proxy for evaporation history from the Bølling-Allerød to the Preboreal. We compared this dataset with other biomarker isotope records in Central Europe. They are all lacking a strong isotopic depletion during the Younger Dryas, which is best explained by the summer sensitivity of the biomarker proxies: As Younger Dryas summers were relatively warm, there is an absence of the strong winter cooling signals recorded in annual water isotope records like Greenland or Lake Steißlingen. Lake evaporation at Bergsee together with other paleohydrological reconstructions draw a coherent picture of the Late Glacial hydroclimate, with strong evidence for warm and dry Younger Dryas summers. Rather than a southward shift of the Westerlies during winter, we suggest that a recently proposed feedback mechanism between North Atlantic sea ice extend, strong winter cooling and summer atmospheric blocking serves as a suitable explanation for summer dryness. Additional confidence to the robustness of these biomarker records is provided by the overall agreement of paleohydrological fluctuations during the Preboreal.
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