Collaborative Research: The Nature and Role of Chemical Weathering and Pedogenesis in Regional Landscape Development, Western Tornetrask Basin, Arctic Sweden

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High-latitude alpine environments are among the most fragile in the world, but they are also among the least understood. Current global circulation models project the greatest temperature changes to occur in the high latitudes. The possibly consequences of this change on local and regional landscapes are uncertain, however. This research project builds in conceptual, spatial, and temporal dimensions on a single-valley project to create a robust regional model of the role of surficial chemical weathering and pedogenesis in landscape development. The study will take place the western end of the Tornetrask basin plus two tributary valleys and their confining ridges in northwestern Sweden at approximately 68-degress N and roughly between 18-degrees and 19-degrees E. The investigators aim to develop a comprehensive investigation of landscape development that recognizes variation in regional glacial history and will contribute to that history by providing more detailed information. They will use cosmogenic dating to develop information on glacial history as well as baseline data with which to determine rates of chemical weathering. This information will be linked to radiocarbon dating of abutting depositional zones to directly link development of adjacent erosional and depositional elements of the landscape. During this phase of the project, the investigators will retrieve crushed dolomite and granite pebbles and buried, machine-polished disks of dolomite, granite, and limestone that were placed in field sites five years earlier in order to assess weathering microvariability by vegetation cover type. These samples will be analyzed using microprobe analysis and scanning electron microscopy and will be compared with control samples that have been stored at a nearby field station.This project is part of a decade-long effort to examine the processes of weathering and soil development in a cold region. This project will build on previous investigations into the nature of chemical weathering and pedogenic processes in the Arctic/alpine landscape of Swedish Lapland. This effort will encompass a broader range of lithologies and start to couple the process studies with well-constrained age control of both bedrock surfaces and soils. The project also offers prospects for contributing to reconstruction of the glacial history of a portion of the Fennoscandian ice sheet. The project will continue development of international collaborative partnerships with French and Swedish researchers.