Batagay megaslump: A review of the permafrost deposits, Quaternary environmental history, and recent development

The Batagay megaslump, in the Yana Uplands of northern Yakutia, Russia, is the largest known retrogressive thaw slump in the world. The slump exposes a remarkable sequence of Ice Age permafrost deposits that record the interaction of colluvial, eolian and periglacial processes on a hillslope episodically forested during the last 650 ka or more in response to climate variability on glacial–interglacial timescales. Numerous bones, teeth, and occasional carcasses of Pleistocene and Holocene mammals have been recovered from the permafrost. The megaslump developed over the course of several decades in three stages: (1) gullying, (2) thaw slumping, and (3) megaslumping. After disturbance to the taiga vegetation cover in the 1940s–1960s, a hillslope gully formed by the early 1960s. The gully initiated thaw slumping along its central part during the 1980s, with the slump enlarging to megaslump (>20 ha) proportions during the 1990s. By 2019, the area of the slump had reached about 80 ha and its headwall above the slump floor was up to about 55 m high. The main geomorphic processes of slump growth are headwall ablation and thermal erosion, producing a distinctive terrain of icy badlands on the slump floor. Though much of the megaslump is rapidly growing at present, it will probably stabilize eventually as an irregular terrain characterized by sandy ridges and sand-filled elongate depressions formed by degradation of the badlands. Comparison of the Batagay megaslump with megaslumps from northwest Canada reveals several similarities and differences in terms of their geomorphology, permafrost deposits, and Quaternary history.</p

Reference database EMBL (ITSCyp)

Fasta file of the EMBL reference database (ITSCyp

Reference database Arctic (gh)

Fasta file of the Arctic reference database (P6 loop of the trnL

Reference database EMBL (gh)

Fasta file of the EMBL reference database (P6 loop of the trnL

Nematoda filtered sequence data

Fasta file containing the filtered sequence data

Sheep diet data

Fasta file containing the sequence dat

Nematoda sequence data

Fasta file containing the raw sequence data

Full permafrost dataset

csv file containing the full permafrost dataset

Reference database EMBL (ITSPoa)

Fasta file of the EMBL reference database (ITSPoa

Megafauna filtered data

Tabulated file containing the filtered data