Climate change induced permafrost thaw in the Arctic is mobilizing ancient dissolved organic carbon (DOC) into headwater streams; however, DOC exported from the mouth of major arctic rivers appears predominantly modern. Here we highlight that ancient (>20,000 years B.P.) permafrost DOC is rapidly utilized by microbes (~50% DOC loss in <7 days) and that permafrost DOC decay rates (0.12 to 0.19 day⁻¹) exceed those for DOC in a major arctic river (Kolyma: 0.09 day⁻¹). Permafrost DOC exhibited unique molecular signatures, including high levels of aliphatics that were rapidly utilized by microbes. As microbes processed permafrost DOC, its distinctive chemical signatures were degraded and converged toward those of DOC in the Kolyma River. The extreme biolability of permafrost DOC and the rapid loss of its distinct molecular signature may explain the apparent contradiction between observed permafrost DOC release to headwaters and the lack of a permafrost signal in DOC exported via major arctic rivers to the ocean.

Ongoing climate warming in the Arctic will thaw permafrost and remobilize substantial terrestrial organic carbon (OC) pools. Around a quarter of northern permafrost OC resides in Siberian Yedoma deposits, the oldest form of permafrost carbon. However, our understanding of the degradation and fate of this ancient OC in coastal and fluvial environments still remains rudimentary. Here, we show that ancient dissolved OC (DOC, >21,000 ¹⁴C years), the oldest DOC ever reported, is mobilized in stream waters draining Yedoma outcrops. Furthermore, this DOC is highly biolabile: 34 ± 0.8% was lost during a 14 day incubation under dark, oxygenated conditions at ambient river temperatures. Mixtures of Yedoma stream DOC with mainstem river and ocean waters, mimicking in situ mixing processes, also showed high DOC losses (14 days; 17 ± 0.8% to 33 ± 1.0%). This suggests that this exceptionally old DOC is among the most biolabile DOC in any previously reported contemporary river or stream in the Arctic.

Northern high-latitude rivers are major conduits of carbon from land to coastal seas and the Arctic Ocean. Arctic warming is promoting terrestrial permafrost thaw and shifting hydrologic flowpaths, leading to fluvial mobilization of ancient carbon stores. Here we describe ¹⁴C and ¹³C characteristics of dissolved organic carbon from fluvial networks across the Kolyma River Basin (Siberia), and isotopic changes during bioincubation experiments. Microbial communities utilized ancient carbon (11,300 to >50,000 ¹⁴C years) in permafrost thaw waters and millennial-aged carbon (up to 10,000 ¹⁴C years) across headwater streams. Microbial demand was supported by progressively younger (¹⁴C-enriched) carbon downstream through the network, with predominantly modern carbon pools subsidizing microorganisms in large rivers and main-stem waters. Permafrost acts as a significant and preferentially degradable source of bioavailable carbon in Arctic freshwaters, which is likely to increase as permafrost thaw intensifies causing positive climate feedbacks in response to on-going climate change.

As Arctic regions warm and frozen soils thaw, the large organic carbon pool stored in permafrost becomes increasingly vulnerable to decomposition or transport. The transfer of newly mobilized carbon to the atmosphere and its potential influence upon climate change will largely depend on the degradability of carbon delivered to aquatic ecosystems. Dissolved organic carbon (DOC) is a key regulator of aquatic metabolism, yet knowledge of the mechanistic controls on DOC biodegradability is currently poor due to a scarcity of long-term data sets, limited spatial coverage of available data, and methodological diversity. Here, we performed parallel biodegradable DOC (BDOC) experiments at six Arctic sites (16 experiments) using a standardized incubation protocol to examine the effect of methodological differences commonly used in the literature. We also synthesized results from 14 aquatic and soil leachate BDOC studies from across the circum-arctic permafrost region to examine pan-arctic trends in BDOC. An increasing extent of permafrost across the landscape resulted in higher DOC losses in both soil and aquatic systems. We hypothesize that the unique composition of (yedoma) permafrost-derived DOC combined with limited prior microbial processing due to low soil temperature and relatively short flow path lengths and transport times, contributed to a higher overall terrestrial and freshwater DOC loss. Additionally, we found that the fraction of BDOC decreased moving down the fluvial network in continuous permafrost regions, i.e. from streams to large rivers, suggesting that highly biodegradable DOC is lost in headwater streams. We also observed a seasonal (January–December) decrease in BDOC in large streams and rivers, but saw no apparent change in smaller streams or soil leachates. We attribute this seasonal change to a combination of factors including shifts in carbon source, changing DOC residence time related to increasing thaw-depth, increasing water temperatures later in the summer, as well as decreasing hydrologic connectivity between soils and surface water as the thaw season progresses. Our results suggest that future climate warming-induced shifts of continuous permafrost into discontinuous permafrost regions could affect the degradation potential of thaw-released DOC, the amount of BDOC, as well as its variability throughout the Arctic summer. We lastly recommend a standardized BDOC protocol to facilitate the comparison of future work and improve our knowledge of processing and transport of DOC in a changing Arctic.