Monitoring seawater CO2 release from thawing permafrost mobilized by Bayelva proglacial stream, RiS ID 11654

The Bayelva river (Kongsfjorden, Svalbard) represents a key site where to unearth the patterns of carbon release from thawing permafrost into coastal waters. For this reason on September 2023 the Institute of Polar Sciences of the National Research Council (ISP-CNR) of Italy, in the framework of the Arctic Field Grant project “Monitoring seawater CO2 release from thawing permafrost mobilized by Bayelva proglacial stream” (RiS ID: 11654), deployed a mooring (Mooring Aldo Pontremoli, MAP) off the river prodelta, with the objective to quantify the seawater CO2 levels related to the degradation of terrigenous organic carbon released from permafrost thawing, which is essential to estimate the acceleration of ocean acidification into the arctic coastal waters. However, the CO2 sensors at the present do not transmit real-time data; instead, their data is stored in internal memory. This AFG is specifically requested with the purpose of recovering the mooring MAP in September 2024 to physically download the CO2 data from the underwater probes. The new CO2 data will be analyzed and processed in the perspective of a mutual collaboration and data sharing between the two institutions involved in this project.