Brief communication: Mountain permafrost acts as an aquiclude during an infiltration experiment monitored with ERT time-lapse measurements

Abstract

Abstract. Continuous frozen layers within the subsoil are generally assumed to act as aquicludes or aquitards. So far, this behavior has been mainly defined analyzing the geochemical characteristics of spring waters. In this work, for the first time, we experimentally confirmed this assumption by executing an infiltration test in a rock glacier of the Southern Alps, Italy. Time-lapse electrical tomography (ERT) technique was adopted to monitor the infiltration of a huge amount of water spilled on the surface of the rock glacier. 24 hours ERT monitoring highlighted that the injected water was not able to infiltrate into the underlying frozen layer.

Insights Into Changing Interglacial Conditions in Subarctic Canada From MIS 11 Through MIS 5e From Seasonally Resolved Speleothem Records

“…A final factor we consider that may affect GV speleothem δ 18 O variability between interglacials is seasonal filtering of infiltration due to changes in the duration of annual ground thaw. In cold regions, winter snow that melts prior to ground thaw runs off rather than infiltrating (Pavoni et al., 2022). Colder periods would cause a decrease in the contribution of winter precipitation as dripwater because prolonged freezing ground conditions would limit the amount of lowest‐δ 18 O precip cold‐season precipitation contributing to dripwaters.…”

Challenges in studying water fluxes within the soil-plant-atmosphere continuum: A tracer-based perspective on pathways to progress

“…These recent studies based on ERT suggest that future experiments, aiming at the investigation of stemflow infiltration area on soil water movement processes, could rely on time-lapse ERT surveys used to trace the infiltration of salt water applied as simulated stemflow. The variation in soil resistivity quantified for different time steps can provide a direct observation of infiltration rate, area and volume, as well as information on the hydraulic behavior of soil layers and subsurface frozen layers (e.g., Pavoni et al, 2022). Such experiments could provide valuable data for developing new models reproducing subsurface flow generation or simulating stemflow and infiltration at the tree, as well as the plot scale and are a clear example of how synergized interdisciplinary methods would drive process understanding as illustrated in Figure 1 (panel 4).…”