Permafrost soils are some of the coolest things I've ever seen, and the primary author, Dr. Erin Rooney, is showing us all her chemistry skills from the second chapter of her dissertation. If you want to see her first chapter, see her other permafrost paper above that describes some of the *physical* changes to permafrost when it undergoes freeze thaw cycles. But this paper is about the *chemical* changes that occur, and what that could mean for arctic-permafrost nutrient cycling.
Permafrost soils are finally getting the attention they deserve. Unfortunately, they may not be around much longer because of how quickly they are thawing. Here we explore what happens during freeze-thaw cycles that may alter their future behavior
SOM *storage* is not the same as its *vulnerability*. This was a 1-yr incubation experiment from NEON's A and B horizons ran by Tyler Weiglein at Virginia Tech as his Masters degree. We found that predictors of soil carbon vulnerability (based on CO2 respiration) were different for surface and subsurface horizons. Turns out, you need to dig deeper to find out the whole story on soils.