Bedrock Fracture Characteristics as a Possible Control on the Distribution of Surge‐Type Glaciers
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Glacier surging has been studied extensively and is understood as a dynamic instability at the glacier bed. Yet an explanation for the heterogeneous distribution of surge‐type glaciers at the scale of a mountain range remains elusive. Here we investigate bedrock discontinuity properties in the basins of 16 surge‐type and nonsurge‐type glaciers in the St. Elias Mountains of Yukon, Canada. Using scaled photographs of bedrock outcrops at the margins of each glacier, we digitize traces of the bedrock discontinuities and with automated purpose‐built software, quantify discontinuity properties that are a function of length, orientation, and spacing of bedrock fractures. We obtain an unexpected result: outcrops in the basins of surge‐type glaciers are less fractured than those in the basins of nonsurge‐type glaciers. We hypothesize that the degree of bedrock fracture may control the extent and location of a clast‐rich till transition zone at the glacier bed. This zone would provide flow resistance conducive to the development of an ice reservoir and thus to surging behavior. To reconcile our observations with the global distribution of surge‐type glaciers, we speculate that surge‐type glaciers may occur in geological settings characterized by an intermediate range of bedrock fracture.
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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 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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".