As Alaska's glaciers retreat, new carbon-storing bogs are forming behind them

New peatlands are forming on ground newly exposed by Alaska's retreating glaciers, and a $94,000 National Science Foundation award to the University of Alaska Fairbanks will map and study them. Alaska's peatlands store carbon and remain vulnerable as permafrost thaws beneath them, and the project will assess how these new peat deposits form and persist while producing planning tools for land managers and communities facing landscape change.

The grant funds UAF's share of InsPIRE, short for Investigating Peatland Initiation in Retreating Glacier Environments, running through July 2029. Principal investigator Louise Farquharson, a research assistant professor at the UAF Geophysical Institute, will examine how the refreezing of newly exposed ground stabilizes and preserves the peat that forms on it.

The work combines two lines of evidence. High-resolution elevation data will be used to update the historical reach of Alaska's glaciers, from the Last Glacial Maximum to the Little Ice Age, and to build a statewide timeline of where and when new peat began forming. Laboratory analysis of peat cores will then reconstruct how those deposits developed, and the observations will feed models that simulate how Alaskan peatlands respond as the climate changes.

The UAF grant is part of a larger British-American collaboration led by Jenna Sutherland of Leeds Beckett University, with Royal Holloway, the University of Leeds and the U.S. Geological Survey. Alaska was chosen, Sutherland said, because "that is the world region where glacier recession is largest and occurring the fastest." The work is meant to produce statewide peatland inventories, vulnerability maps and interactive tools for planners.