Alice Witherick

Biography

I graduated from Keele in 2015 with a BSc degree in Biology and Geography. I have gone on to start a MPhil in Glaciology with a view to turning it into a PhD. I intend to travel to the Canadian Arctic to Bylot Island to undertake my research.

Research and scholarship

Project:

Assessing the particle characteristics of glacial sediments at a range of spatial scales.

The analysis of the sedimentological characteristics of glacial sediments is routinely employed by glaciologists and glacial geomorphologists in order to reconstruct and infer various glacier characteristics including their extent, thermal regime and dynamic behaviour. Clast shape and roundness characteristics are a specific attribute that have been widely used to identify transport pathways and to infer the operation of basal processes that can modify clast characteristics during transport. The application of these techniques is however typically limited to clasts of between 1-50 cm in size that represent a small subset of the particle sizes present within glacially-transported sediment.

The research project will focus on determining the sedimentary characteristics of glacial debris transported by polythermal and cold-based glaciers on Bylot Island, located in the Canadian Arctic. The primary aim is to characterise the particle shape and roundness characteristics of glacially-transported sediment at a range of spatial scales. In addition to the typical “meso-scale” characteristics measured in the field, this project will also employ scanning electron microscopy (SEM) to analyse the “micro-scale” characteristics (<1mm diameter) and the image analysis of drone-acquired digital imagery to analyse the “macro-scale” characteristics (>1m diameter).

The project will make use of sediment samples, imagery and primary data collected from Bylot Island in the Canadian Arctic by the lead supervisor in 2014. The analysis of this sediment will determine the degree of modification associated with glacial transport in a High Arctic region. This will allow comparisons to be made with work undertaken in more temperate glacial environments and will thereby help glacial geomorphologists to clarify the links between glacier thermal regimes, glacier flow and the resulting clast characteristics.