Primarily investigation with multiple methods on permafrost state around a rapid change lake in the interior of the Tibet Plateau

Abstract

Changes of the lakes on high-altitude regions of the Tibet Plateau influence the state of the surrounding permafrost. Due to the climate warming and wetting trend, extreme events including lake outburst has occurred more frequent. In 2011, an outburst event occurred on the Zonag Lake and this event changed the water distribution in the basin, leading a rapid expansion of the Tailwater lake, named as the Salt Lake. However, the construction of the drainage channel in the Salt Lake ended the expansion process and the shrinkage of the lake started since 2020. To investigate the permafrost state around the Salt Lake, multiple methods, including drilling boreholes, the unmanned aerial vehicle survey and the ground penetrating radar detection have been applied. By integrating these multi-source data, the thermal regime, topography and the spatial distribution of the permafrost around the Salt Lake were analyzed. The result showed that the permafrost state around the Salt Lake was related to the distance from the lake water. The permafrost table appears at 90 m away from the Salt Lake and interrupted by a nearby thermokarst lake at 220 m. The ground temperature in the natural field is 0.2 °C lower than the temperature in the lake at a depth of −5 m.