My first PhD student, Saule Akhmetkaliyeva, has published her thesis in Science of the Total Environment. Her study compares organic carbon and bacterial communities across three deglaciating Arctic catchments.
After a glacier thaws and retreats, the exposed land is usually quite bare and carbon poor. Saule visited deglaciating sites in Sweden, Iceland and Greenland to measure the amount of carbon present in the sediments and the development of soil bacterial communities over time. She found that bacterial communities change as the soil develops and the organic carbon content rises.
In Sweden, the deglaciation was very recent and the soil very thin, with lowest carbon contents and very few soil biomarkers. Iceland had some very young soils, but also some older moraines with age estimates – older moraines had higher carbon contents and a more developed soil bacterial community. In Greenland, the catchment had been deglaciated for thousands of years and a fully-developed ecosystem was present, with the highest amount of organic carbon, plenty of soil-specific biomarkers, and a stable microbial community.
The paper is available, open access, from the journal website and via MMU e-space