Hydrological control on carbon export and cycling in three subarctic micro-catchments

Future climatic change in the Scandinavian subarctic region will likely affect export of organic carbon and inorganic uptake of atmospheric carbon dioxide in weathering reactions. These two processes are both likely to increase in magnitude as a response to increasing precipitation. Whereas the former is linked to processes resulting in a positive feedback to atmospheric CO₂, the latter causes sequestration of atmospheric CO₂ and therefore provides a negative feedback to global warming. Links between variables such as soil maturity, flow routing, water residence time, carbon export and weathering rates need to be further established in order to evaluate the effects of future climatic change on the hydrology and carbon economy of subarctic catchments. Further, little attention has been given to the long-term development of mentioned hydrologic processes. We present here, detailed water and nutrient mass balances for three subarctic micro-catchments (<1 km²) located along a landscape maturity gradient in the Abisko area in northern Sweden. Stream- and soil water, precipitation and snowpacks were sampled frequently. Annual nutrient yields, flowpath variability, organic content of snowpacks and response in water quality to snowmelt-induced runoff events were assessed within these catchments. Along the landscape maturity gradient studied, there was a large variability in flowpath control on solute composition and yields. This variabilty was characterised by an increasing importance of a groundwater flowpath towards the more mature site, resulting in the highest concentration and yields of weathering product at this site. Long term control on carbon fluxes via hydrologic flowpaths might therefore differ in subarctic Scandinavia compare to the Glacier Bay area in Alaska, for which the importance of groundwater has been shown to decrease with landscape maturity. This is due to the geomorphological setting of these contrasting landscapes; the time/space-substitution and uniform soil conditions after deglaciation which are applicable for Alaskan catchments are replaced here by erosion and transport of sediment from the top to the bottom of valleys. Further, our results provide evidence that a large part of the carbon input to the high altitude catchments was derived from microbial production within the snowpack. This input had a magnitude similar to overall loss of organic carbon, suggesting that snowmelt carbon input significantly contributes to microbial and weathering processes within the soil of these systems.