River Ice Processes and Changes Across the Northern Regions

Serpentine (Floating) Ice Channels and their Interaction with Riverbed Permafrost in the Lena River Delta, Russia

“…The SAR signal either dissipates into frozen bottom sediments under the bedfast ice, resulting in low backscatter, or scatters from the rough ice-water interface, resulting in high backscatter (Figure 7B). Based on reported ice thicknesses of the Lena River (Yang et al, 2002(Yang et al, , 2021, zones of serpentine ice are restricted to regions with water depths greater than ∼1.5 m.…”

“…In addition to the complex interactions between hydrological, sedimentological, and biological processes that occur in most river deltas, Arctic deltas are characterized over a long period by the cryosphere, which is strongly affected by amplified Arctic climate warming and subject to profound changes. The observed increase of solid precipitation (Prowse et al, 2011), earlier river ice break up and later freeze up (Cooley and Pavelsky, 2016;Park et al, 2016;Brown et al, 2018), thinning of the river ice (Prowse et al, 2011;Shiklomanov and Lammers, 2014;Arp et al, 2020;Yang et al, 2021), degradation of the permafrost within the river catchments (Biskaborn et al, 2019), as well as the increase of water and heat energy discharge (Ahmed et al, 2020;Park et al, 2020) in most of the Arctic rivers induce a multitude of interacting processes controlling the physical and ecological state of these regions and the adjacent coastal and offshore waters of the Arctic Ocean. Understanding Arctic delta systems and their response to climate warming requires more detailed knowledge of the interactions between deltaic processes and the three components of the cryosphere: snow, river ice and permafrost.…”