ArticleScience advances2021
Increasing Pleistocene permafrost persistence and carbon cycle conundrums inferred from Canadian speleothems.
Article in Science advances, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 4 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
4 citing papers in PubMed, 26 citations in OpenAlex.
- Soil Carbon Dynamics Reshaped by Ancient Carbon Quantification.Global change biology · 2025Article
- Asynchronicity of deglacial permafrost thawing controlled by millennial-scale climate variability.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Highly restricted near-surface permafrost extent during the mid-Pliocene warm period.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
- Terrestrial evidence for ocean forcing of Heinrich events and subglacial hydrologic connectivity of the Laurentide Ice Sheet.Science advances · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
9 authors at 5 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Permafrost carbon represents a potentially powerful amplifier of climate change, but little is known about permafrost sensitivity and associated carbon cycling during past warm intervals. We reconstruct permafrost history in western Canada during Pleistocene interglacials from 130 uranium-thorium ages on 72 speleothems, cave deposits that only accumulate with deep ground thaw. We infer that permafrost thaw extended to the high Arctic during one or more periods between ~1.5 million and 0.5 million years ago but has been limited to the sub-Arctic since 400,000 years ago. Our Canadian speleothem growth history closely parallels an analogous reconstruction from Siberia, suggesting that this shift toward more stable permafrost across the Pleistocene may have been Arctic-wide. In contrast, interglacial greenhouse gas concentrations were relatively stable throughout the Pleistocene, suggesting that either permafrost thaw did not trigger substantial carbon release to the atmosphere or it was offset by carbon uptake elsewhere on glacial-interglacial time scales.
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Registered trials
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