Glaciers carved the deep valleys of Banff, eroded Ontario to deposit the fertile soils of the Prairies and continue to change the Earth’s surface. But how fast do glaciers sculpt the landscape?
Glaciers carved the deep valleys of Banff, eroded Ontario to deposit the fertile soils of the Prairies and continue to change the Earth’s surface. But how fast do glaciers sculpt the landscape?
Published today in Nature Geoscience, University of Victoria (UVic) geographer Sophie Norris and her international team provide the most comprehensive view of how fast glaciers erode, and how they change the landscape. Most importantly, their research also provides an estimate of the rate of future erosion for more than 180,000 glaciers worldwide.
Using a machine learning-based global analysis, Norris and her research team have worked to predict glacial erosion for 85 per cent of modern glaciers. Their regression equations estimate that 99 per cent of glaciers erode between 0.02 and 2.68 millimetres per year—roughly the width of a credit card.
Read More: University of Victoria
A glacier found in the Canadian Arctic. (Photo Credit: John Gosse)
