Evaluation of Wildfire Initiated Thermokarst Degradation Using in-situ and Remotely Sensed Data at a site on the Seward Peninsula of Alaska

In a remote part of the Kougarok River drainage, located on Alaska's Seward Peninsula in western Alaska, four tundra fires of varying severity have modified the landscape over the last twenty five years. The fires have triggered thermokarst, resulting in large volume mass wasting of ice-rich permafrost as well as small deformation of the ground surface affecting just local microtopography. The disturbance has resulted in an ecosystem composition shift in many of the burned areas as well as changes to the carbon content within the active layer. Within the perimeter of these multiple fires, the University of Alaska Fairbanks established several micrometeorological and a one kilometer square Circumpolar Active Layer Monitoring site in 1999. We use these data sets in combination with a variety of remote sensing imagery such as differential inSAR to track thermokarst development and restabilization of the landscape.