Using bed-roughness signatures to characterise glacial landform assemblages beneath contemporary and palaeo ice-sheets

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract

Palaeo-glacial landforms can give insights into bed roughness that currently cannot be captured underneath contemporary-ice streams. A few studies have measured bed roughness of palaeo-ice streams but the bed roughness of specific landform assemblages has not been assessed. If glacial landform assemblages have a characteristic bed-roughness signature, this could potentially be used to constrain where certain landform assemblages exist underneath contemporary-ice sheets. To test this, bed roughness was calculated along 5 m × 5 m resolution transects (NEXTMap DTM, 5 m resolution), which were placed over glacial landform assemblages (e.g. drumlins) in the UK. We find that a combination of total roughness and anisotropy of roughness can be used to define characteristic roughness signatures of glacial landform assemblages. The results show that different window sizes are required to determine the characteristic roughness for a wide range of landform types and to produce bed-roughness signatures of these. Mega scale glacial lineations on average have the lowest bed-roughness values and are the most anisotropic landform assemblage.
Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)518-532
JournalJournal of Glaciology
Volume68
Issue number269
Early online date7 Dec 2021
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - Jun 2022

Bibliographical note

© The Author(s), 2021.

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