Experiments on the dynamics and sedimentary products of glacier slip

Abstract

Experimental work in glacial geomorphology is focused almost entirely on processes in the thin shear zone at the beds of sliding glaciers, where ice at its pressure–melting temperature moves over either rigid rock or deformable till. Experiments with rotary shear devices illuminate constitutive behavior there, central to the dynamics of fast-moving glaciers, and provide a foundation for interpreting the sedimentary record of glacier slip and associated sediment transport. Results from experiments designed to study ice sliding over a rigid wavy bed, shear deformation of till, and plowing of clasts across the surface of a till bed point to a common conclusion: drag at the bed can decrease with increasing slip velocity, thereby concentrating driving stress elsewhere and promoting rapid glacier flow. This rate-weakening behavior at glacier beds is in contrast to the viscous slip resistance assumed in ice-sheet models and most efforts to determine distributions of basal drag from glacier surface velocities. Ring-shear experiments in which various basal tills and more idealized materials are sheared to high strains provide quantitative insight into grain size evolution, mixing at contacts between basal tills, microstructure development, particle-fabric development, and development of anisotropy of magnetic susceptibility. Preferred orientations of principal magnetic susceptibilities provide the most dependable and complete description of till shear patterns. When applied to basal tills of the geologic record, magnetic till fabrics measured along thick till sections and calibrated experimentally indicate that deformation of the bed by two lobes of the Laurentide ice sheet was shallow (<1m), patchy, and occurred as till progressively accreted. Rates of sediment transport by bed shear were thus significantly less than estimates based on models that invoke deep, pervasive shear of the bed. The lack of an experimental tradition in glacial geomorphology leaves many research avenues open for exploration but also increases the challenge of demonstrating the relevance of experimental results to theoretical and field-based studies.