A long-term field study (1951-2003) of ventifacts formed by katabatic winds at Paulatuk, western Arctic coast, Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Field measurements have been made since 1951 on hundreds of ventifacts abraded by strong, southerly, katabatic winds that blow in winter and summer past Paulatuk, a small western Arctic coastal settlement. Sand is commonly entrained by the strongest winds in winter. The ventifacts, all glacial erratics deposited prior to 12 ka BP, have been gradually rotated by the southerly winds until the long axes of most ventifacts now trend approximately eastwest, normal to the katabatic winds. In contrast, pebbles have a slightly preferred northsouth orientation, parallel to the katabatic winds. The facets on sandstone and diabase ventifacts are almost planar, but are rounded on granites and hackled on limestones, reflecting the influence of both solution and abrasion. Abrasion is evident on the built structures in Paulatuk, but despite the over 50 years of observation, abrasion of the ventifacts has been virtually undetectable. The extremely slow abrasion rate has been estimated from: observations on two ventifacts from 1951 to 2003; photographic comparisons and observations of 60 ventifacts from 1968 to 2003; optical examination of 14 granite slabs, polished and unpolished, exposed to abrasion from 1967 to 1976; and comparisons of the windward and leeward sides of six large rock caches built with ventifacts probably long before 1900. If the present rates of abrasion are representative of Holocene conditions, ventifact formation has probably taken much of postglacial time. The increase in vegetation cover around many rocks between 1968 and 2003 suggests that the climate has changed in the last three decades.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".