Presenter: Amelia Slama-Catron
Authors: Amelia Slama-Catron
Faculty Advisor: Alex Tye
Institution: Dixie State University
Continental ice sheets and glaciers once covered a majority of the world, and yet their impact on topography is understudied. More globally common forms of erosion, specifically fluvial erosion, have been examined over many decades, and by a wide-range of studies; it has been found that the relief structure formed by fluvial erosion follows a power-law relief correlation. Continental ice sheets and glaciation have not been studied to the same lengths, and the relation of erosion and land formation is not known. Examining and comparing relief structure between landscapes shaped by fluvial erosion and those shaped by subglacial erosion will allow us to see if glaciation does follow the same power-law correlation. We examined three sub-continental sized study areas within the North American continent. Two of the sections were eroded fluvially (one covering portions of the southeastern United States, and one covering states just west of the Mississippi River), and one located in the Canadian Shield. In each study area, vertical relief was measured within a circular moving window with varying radii. Data points were generated and collected to create logarithmic graphs that displayed trendlines of the power law for each area. Although all three areas had different values of absolute mean relief, the data indicated that the relationship between relief and moving window size is well-approximated by a power-law function for all three cases. No major differences in the relationship between each form of erosion and relief structure was found between the area that was glacially eroded and those eroded fluvially.