Hess Altitudes and Other Morphological Estimators of Glacier Equilibrium Lines
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Hess altitude h on a valley glacier is the altitude of that contour that is most nearly straight. The Kurowsky altitude k is the average of the glacier’s minimum and maximum elevations. The glaciation level g of a glacierized region is the average of the elevations of the lowest glacierized and the highest unglacierized summits. We study the relationships between these morphological variables in well-mapped areas in Axel Heiberg Island, Nunavut, and in northern British Columbia, and also in a set of more widely distributed glaciers with well-known equilibrium-line altitudes e. We confirm that the relationships are strong, although their dispersion is considerable both for single glaciers and at the regional scale. On average h is 130 m below the long-term mean equilibrium line, k is slightly below it, and g is 200 m above it. There is very little morphoclimatic information in h that is not also conveyed by k, and since the latter is faster to measure and is already tabulated for tens of thousands of glaciers, its use is preferable. The glaciation level is less concordant. We suggest that it records interactions between landscape and climate on a somewhat slower time scale. The linear dependences of h on k and g, and of e on each of the 3 morphological estimators, have slopes slightly but significantly less than 1. This result is not yet understood.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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 teacher head, 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".