Can organic contaminant concentrations in permafrost soils be upscaled from soil carbon content and landform types? Case studies from Canada and Svalbard

Arctic permafrost soils are important reservoirs of contaminants on time scales ranging from days to millennia. The physical and chemical processes occurring in permafrost systems, susceptible to perturbations under climate change, impact on the cycling of organic contaminants. The extensive work in the Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Program (AMAP) on Arctic contaminants highlights an acute lack of data on contaminants in Arctic soils, particularly below the permafrost table. A key aspect for mapping contaminants and quantifying potential secondary contaminant release is the identification of parameters and landscape properties that we can use to model and upscale from limited in situ observations. Since empirical data on contaminant distribution is still scarce, we must rely on correlations with other parameters for upscaling. Furthermore, for several organic analytes, it has been shown that environmental parameters such as soil depth and organic carbon content can substantially alter environmental contamination patterns, and this must be taken into account when interpreting organic contaminants environmental concentration patterns in terms of temperature and physicochemical properties as parameters that might affect distribution and potential release. Consequently, the main objective of the present study is to explore the potential influence of Organic carbon concentration (%) and content (kg C / m3) and landscape features in permafrost soil scenarios on the fate of organic contaminants on a regional scale, improving the ability to produce an initial projection of permafrost thaw impacts. Case studies from Canada and Svalbard are presented to illustrate the study applied to different permafrost environments. We will illustrate the statistical analysis performed and the statistical models derived from the correlations between the different analytes and the most studied chemical-physical factors.