Speaking: Ann Rowan, University of Sheffield
The next Landscapes Live online seminar of the Spring 2022 block will be by Ann Rowan. This seminar will be live on Zoom and open to anyone interested (with a limit of 300 participants). Register in advance for this meeting.
Abstract
Mountain glaciers respond rapidly to climate change and build ice-marginal (terminal and lateral) moraines that form a potentially valuable record of terrestrial climate across a wide range of latitudes and elevations. However, interpreting this palaeoclimate record relies on reconstructing past glacier volume, and so making assumptions about how glacier mass, erosion and sediment flux varied as climate changed. A different approach is to use forward modelling of the feedbacks between ice flow, sediment transport and deposition to interpret glacial landforms. From field observations of moraine sequences in the Everest region of Nepal, we demonstrate that careful interpretation of moraines can elucidate past glacier dynamics and Holocene palaeoclimate change.