Coastal gullies formed by piping on a permafrost marine terrace near Iqaluktuuttiaq (Cambridge Bay), Nunavut, Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Piping is the formation of subsurface tunnels (pipes) due to sediment removal by groundwater flow, which can lead to surface collapse and gully formation, thus transitioning from subsurface to surface erosion. While piping occurs across various climates, its formation in periglacial environments and its impact on these landscapes remain poorly documented. This study examines the morphology and environmental conditions of gullies that formed on a permafrost marine terrace near Iqaluktuuttiaq (Cambridge Bay), Nunavut (Canada), and provides the first conceptual model linking piping to gully formation in a periglacial environment. Nineteen gullies were surveyed along a 430-m coastline with a 2–4 m high bluff experiencing accelerated coastal erosion. Field observations, remotely piloted aircraft system (RPAS) surveys, and permafrost cryostratigraphy confirmed that the gullies did not form from ice-wedge degradation, but rather from lateral groundwater flow causing piping. Piping was confined to the top sand layer of the terrace, where the thaw front and underlying layer of silt loam acted as impermeable barriers (aquitards). Piping likely peaked during snowmelt when the sand layer became saturated. Gullies predominantly formed within the last 4–5 m of the terrace where the steep bluff and collocated seepage face, deeper thaw front, and terrace subsidence likely increased the lateral hydraulic gradient. This study improves understanding of piping in periglacial environments and highlights its interactions with surface, thermal, and coastal erosion in shaping Arctic coastal landscapes.
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 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 | 0.000 | 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 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.020 | 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".