ISOPERM
Welcome to the ISOPERM — a new, multidisciplinary, collaborative research project investigating the stability of permafrost in Siberia throughout the last ca. 2 million years.
Siberian permafrost is a major carbon store, containing double the amount of carbon found in today’s atmosphere. Anthropogenic global warming threatens the stability of this ancient permafrost, with the potential to release vast amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, further exacerbating climate change.
This project aims at the reconstruction of past continental temperatures, seasonal characteristics, and historical permafrost extent, thus establishing critical thresholds for Siberian permafrost formation and thaw that can inform predictions of permafrost dynamics in the near future.
Collaborators
ISOPERM is a collaboration between the Department of Geography and Environmental Sciences at Northumbria University, United Kingdom, and the Alfred Wegener Institute Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research in Potsdam, Germany. We work closely with colleagues at The Technical University of Irkutsk and the Arabika Speleoclub in Russia, the LARA Lab at the University of Bern, the Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf in Germany, the University of Oxford in the UK, and the Israelian Geological Survey.
This project is funded by The Leverhulme Trust.
News and events
ISOPERM at EGU
15 April 2024
Isopermers Seb Breitenbach and Franzi Lechleitner will be presenting their work at this year’s EGU.
You can find Seb in Session CL5.4 (16th April) who’ll be showing a poster about clumped isotopes in speleothem drip cups.
Franzi will be also be in Session CL5.4 (15th April), talking about speleothems as organic carbon archives.
ISOPERM at BCRA Symposium 2023
21 October 2023
Stuart will be presenting a poster outlining our project, and highlighting some of our recent findings from the Miocene at the year’s BCRA Symposium in Leeds.
Drop by for a chat at the afternoon’s poster session
Back from fieldwork
September 2023
We’re just got home from a fantastic couple of weeks in northern Mongolia, exploring unchartered caves and collecting samples.
Want to know more? Our PhD student Maria has just written a blog.
Dispatches from the field
We spent a month in Siberia collecting speleothem samples throughout February 2022. Check out our travel blog and explore what it’s like doing fieldwork in some of the coldest regions on Earth.
Photo gallery from our 2022 fieldwork
Presentations
BCRA Symposium , Leeds University, 21 October 2023. Stuart Umbo (poster)
EU Conference on Permafrost 2023, Spain, June 2023. Alena Giesche (poster)
Introducing ISOPERM: Reconstructing Siberian permafrost change, University of East Anglia, 15 Nov 2022 (Stuart Umbo, invited speaker)
EGU 2022, 26 May 2022, Reconstruction of Holocene wildfire occurrence using levoglucosan and lignin biomarkers from Siberian stalagmites by Jade Robinson et al, room 0.49/50, 13:38 CET (Short oral presentation)
EGU 2022, 26 May 2022, RA late Miocene seasonality and wildfire record from northern Siberia utilising novel speleothem proxies by Stuart Umbo et al, room 0.49/50, 13:52 CET (Short oral presentation)
UK Arctic Science Conference, 11 – 13 April 2022, Durham University. Stuart Umbo (poster)
Analytical facilities
Get in touch…
Publications
Jongejans, L. L., Mangelsdorf, K., Karger, C., Opel, T., Wetterich, S., Courtin, J., Meyer, H., Kizyakov, A. I., Grosse, G., Shepelev, A. G., Syromyatnikov, I. I., Fedorov, A. N., and Strauss, J.: Molecular biomarkers in Batagay megaslump permafrost deposits reveal clear differences in organic matter preservation between glacial and interglacial periods, The Cryosphere, 16, 3601–3617. https://doi.org/10.5194/tc-16-3601-2022
Courtin J, Perfumo A, Andreev A, Opel T, Stoof-Leichsenring K, Edwards M, Murton J, Herzschuh U. (2022). Pleistocene glacial and interglacial ecosystems inferred from ancient DNA analyses of permafrost sediments from Batagay megaslump, East Siberia. Environmental DNA. https://doi.org/10.1002/edn3.336
Umbo S, Lechleitner F, Breitenbach S. (2022). The story of interglacial permafrost unraveled in frozen caves, Past Global Changes Horizons, vol. 2, 41 – 45 https://doi.org/10.22498/pages.horiz.2.41
ISOPERM 