Heterogeneous changes of soil microclimate in high mountains and glacier forelands.
Where this comes from
- Record sourced from PubMed, PMID 37652908.
- Also identified by DOI 10.1038/s41467-023-41063-6 and PMC identifier 10471727.
- Licence recorded as CC BY.
- The licence permits redistribution, so the abstract is shown in full and the full text is available from the publisher.
Abstract
Landscapes nearby glaciers are disproportionally affected by climate change, but we lack detailed information on microclimate variations that can modulate the impacts of global warming on proglacial ecosystems and their biodiversity. Here, we use near-subsurface soil temperatures in 175 stations from polar, equatorial and alpine glacier forelands to generate high-resolution temperature reconstructions, assess spatial variability in microclimate change from 2001 to 2020, and estimate whether microclimate heterogeneity might buffer the severity of warming trends. Temporal changes in microclimate are tightly linked to broad-scale conditions, but the rate of local warming shows great spatial heterogeneity, with faster warming nearby glaciers and during the warm season, and an extension of the snow-free season. Still, most of the fine-scale spatial variability of microclimate is one-to-ten times larger than the temporal change experienced during the past 20 years, indicating the potential for microclimate to buffer climate change, possibly allowing organisms to withstand, at least temporarily, the effects of warming.