The Empress Group in Alberta, Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Basal gravel and sand mantling the bedrock floors of buried valleys throughout the Canadian Interior Plains, and conformably overlying proglacial lacustrine sediment, comprise the Empress Group. While previously conceptualized as stratigraphically equivalent deposits of preglacial rivers prior to the first and most extensive continental and montane glaciations, subsequent stratigraphic studies indicated that buried valley basal gravel must have been deposited between, or during, progressively more extensive continental glaciations and could not be stratigraphically equivalent throughout the buried valley network. However, in the general absence of formation-rank stratigraphic description of basal gravel units that might better inform the geologic history of the deposits, most workers simply consider Empress Group sediments time-transgressive. In this paper, we examine basal gravel at provincial and regional scales to understand its genesis and geologic history. At the provincial scale, we map basal gravel in three dimensions using a novel machine learning approach. At the regional scale, we formally define basal gravel formations at either end of the largest buried valley system in Alberta, which informs its glacial history and physiographic development and shows the importance of formation-rank stratigraphic description. Our results indicate that the buried valley network across Alberta is palimpsest in genesis and basal gravel units within it are chronostratigraphically intercalated between tills. We advocate that the Empress Group definition be extended across Alberta with modifications to improve its clarity and utility, and formally define the Old Fort, Unchaga, Ipiatik, and Winefred formations as part of the Empress Group.
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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 | 0.003 |
| 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) | 0.007 | 0.001 |
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".