Análisis de los ciclos de congelación y descongelación en la capa activa en el entorno de la BAE JCI. Periodo 2000-2011

Abstract

Close to the Spanish Antarctic Station our research team drilled, at the 1999-2000 Antarctic campaign, a 2,30 m shallow borehole in quartzite bedrock. This borehole was instrumented with temperature data loggers (Tinytag model) that have allowed us to register the gradient thermal in a continuous regime evolution during the 2000-2011 period. The analysis of the temperature data allows to describe the temporal evolution of the freezing and thawing cycles in the active layer, as well as the N-Factor variability, related with the soil surface thermal behavior and its energy balance. In this work we discuss the different freezing and thawing mechanisms in monthly and annual periods. The study shows a important freezing and thawing inter annual variability,, the annual cumulative index showed values in the following intervals: freezing index (-700, -300 ºC day) and thawing index (400, 700 ºC day).