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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 and Dalhousie University geographers 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 contemporary erosion for more than 180,000 glaciers worldwide. 

Using a machine learning-based global analysis, Sophie Norris of UVic 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.

“Given the extreme difficulty in measuring glacial erosion in active glacial settings, this study provides us with estimates of this process for remote locations worldwide,” says John Gosse of Dalhousie.

Understanding the complex factors that cause erosion underneath glaciers is vital information for landscape management, long-term nuclear waste storage and monitoring the movement of sediment and nutrients around the world. 

Norris started this work while a post-doctoral fellow at Dalhousie and concluded it at UVic. The team of collaborators included the University of Grenoble Alpes (France), Dartmouth College (US), Pennsylvania State University (US) and the University of California Irvine (US). The work was carried out in partnership with and financially supported by the Canadian Nuclear Waste Management Organization.

Media contact:

Alison Auld
Senior Research Reporter
Dalhousie University
Cell: 1-902-220-0491
Email: alison.auld@dal.ca