Spatiotemporal Dynamics of Lake Patterns in a Changing Arctic Tundra Landscape

The evolution of Arctic tundra lakes exhibits percolating properties. More specifically, there exists a threshold where initially disjoint lakes gradually transition into a network of complex, interconnected structures on a macroscopic level when the value of some parameter exceeds a critical value. Behaviors of these lakes, primarily characterized by the lake area fraction and fractal dimension of the system, are significant to statistical physics due to their analogous nature to phase transitions. On account of similarities in geographical characteristics of the Arctic tundra landscape and that of slow immiscible fluid invasion processes in porous media, we developed our model based on a standard invasion percolation model under the influence of changing temperature. This model helps to explain the critical percolation threshold in the lake system in order to understand long-term lake dynamics and its contribution to climate change.