On the possibility of deep seabed permafrost to occupy Ca. 7 million km2 in the Arctic Ocean
Abstract
Arctic Ocean (AO) shelf permafrost is the most popular and best-known type of subsea permafrost. Genetically, it is analogous to the ordinary subaerial permafrost. Today, the following types of subsea permafrost are also known: i) ice-bearing sediment layers formed from porewater freshening of terrestrial origins, ii) thermokarst lake taliks refreezing under cryotic seabed conditions, iii) bottom-fast ice preserving permafrost due to efficient heat conduction from atmosphere-ice-sediment coupling in winter, and iv) similar permafrost aggradation processes occurring beneath small islands and spits evolving with sediment dynamics. Here, we propose another type of marine permafrost: a deep seabed permafrost (DSP) underlying AO bottom sediments in a cryotic but not frozen state because of salty, supercooled seawater. Primary calculations indicate that the area of DSP deeper than 150 m may reach about 7.0 million km ² , with the contacting seawater temperature ranging from − 2.5 °C to 0 °C. The formation and persistence of DSP or, almost equivalently, the negative-temperature regime of the AO seawater at the deeper layers may have begun at the Pliocene–Pleistocene border, ca. 3.5–2.4 Ma ago.
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BibTeX
@article{dobinski2026possibility,
title = {{On the possibility of deep seabed permafrost to occupy Ca. 7 million km2 in the Arctic Ocean}},
author = {Wojciech Dobiński and Kazuyuki Saito},
journal = {Scientific Reports},
year = {2026},
month = oct,
doi = {10.1038/s41598-026-68112-6},
url = {https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-026-68112-6},
note = {CC BY 4.0},
}
RIS
TY - JOUR
TI - On the possibility of deep seabed permafrost to occupy Ca. 7 million km2 in the Arctic Ocean
AU - Wojciech Dobiński
AU - Kazuyuki Saito
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/10/13
JO - Scientific Reports
DO - 10.1038/s41598-026-68112-6
UR - https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-026-68112-6
AB - Arctic Ocean (AO) shelf permafrost is the most popular and best-known type of subsea permafrost. Genetically, it is analogous to the ordinary subaerial permafrost. Today, the following types of subsea permafrost are also known: i) ice-bearing sediment layers formed from porewater freshening of terrestrial origins, ii) thermokarst lake taliks refreezing under cryotic seabed conditions, iii) bottom-fast ice preserving permafrost due to efficient heat conduction from atmosphere-ice-sediment coupling in winter, and iv) similar permafrost aggradation processes occurring beneath small islands and spits evolving with sediment dynamics. Here, we propose another type of marine permafrost: a deep seabed permafrost (DSP) underlying AO bottom sediments in a cryotic but not frozen state because of salty, supercooled seawater. Primary calculations indicate that the area of DSP deeper than 150 m may reach about 7.0 million km ² , with the contacting seawater temperature ranging from − 2.5 °C to 0 °C. The formation and persistence of DSP or, almost equivalently, the negative-temperature regime of the AO seawater at the deeper layers may have begun at the Pliocene–Pleistocene border, ca. 3.5–2.4 Ma ago.
SN - 2045-2322
ER -