Geology 101 - Introduction to Physical Geology

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Lab - Glaciers and Ice Ages

Introduction
Advance Preparation and Materials Needed
Geology Learning Outcomes
Methods
Lab Procedures
Deciphering glacial landforms
Learning about past climate conditions from ice core data

INTRODUCTION
Glaciers are bodies of ice, on land, formed from accumulated snowfall, which flow under the force of their own weight. Glaciers are created by climates in
which more snow accumulates each year than melts away in the warm season. Although there are many glaciers on earth today, during the maximum
glaciations of the Pleistocene ice ages there was so much more glacial ice on earth that sea level was over 400 feet lower than it is today, the missing
water frozen into glaciers.

Glaciers are powerful agents of erosion, transport, and deposition of sediments. In accomplishing these tasks, glaciers modify the surface of the earth in
distinctive ways, creating tell-tale signs of erosion and deposition and characteristic types of sediment deposits.

Many glacial erosional landforms have names from European languages, from countries that were affected by ice sheets and extensive alpine glaciation
during the Pleistocene ice ages, where geologists first came to understand the glacial origins of these landforms on a scientific basis. Names of glacially
eroded landforms include cirque, horn, arête, roche moutonnée. On a smaller scale, glacial erosion may leave glacial polish, striations, facets, gouges,
furrows, and chatter marks on the surface of bedrock beneath a glacier.

What gets eroded in one place gets deposited in another. All forms of sediment deposited as a result of glaciers – either from glacial ice directly, or from
glacial melt water, or from glacially spawned icebergs – are known in combination as glacial drift. Till is the name for the massive mixture of coarse to fine
sediment deposited directly by glacial ice, creating glacial depositional landforms known as moraines. Erratics are boulders moved by a glacier and
dropped on the landscape when the glacier melts. Outwash is bedded layers of sediment deposited by water flowing from glaciers.

Because glaciers leave such characteristic signs of erosion and deposition behind, you can tell by analyzing a landscape if glaciers were recently on that
landscape. By mapping the landscape in detail, you can tell which way the glacial ice flowed and exactly which parts of the landscape were glaciated. You
can also find where glaciers caused lakes to form, and see if any major floods occurred from abrupt drainage of glacially dammed lakes.

Glaciers are signposts of cold climates, and the layers of ice in a glacier – each layer of ice representing one year of snowfall, with the tiny bubbles of air
trapped within each layer representing a sample of the earth's atmosphere – are a record of the climate conditions not only for that particular location, but
for the global atmosphere, over the span of time recorded by the layers of glacial ice.

In the first part of this lab you will interpret glacial landforms and glaciers on topographic maps. In the second part of this lab you will interpret past climate
conditions on earth using data from layers of glacial ice that were drilled and extracted from an ice sheet in Antarctica.

ADVANCE PREPARATION AND MATERIALS NEEDED

Read this page completely. It is specifically designed to prepare you for completing the lab worksheet. The worksheet, which is separate, contains a
similar set of detailed questions that you will answer and turn in.
Read the Glaciers & Ice Ages Basics page. It will help you become familiar with details of glaciers, the landscape they leave behind, factors involved
in climate change, and glacial periods throughout earth history. In addition, review the Basics Table of glacial landforms.
Reread the topographic maps section of the maps Basics page, specifically the section on rules for contour lines.
To perform the lab you will need:
a computer with access to the Internet
green, blue, and red colored pencils
the Glaciers and Ice Ages Lab Worksheet

Note: You may find it helpful to open Google Earth and type in the locations of the topographic maps (below). Or, if you cannot use Google Earth, go on
the Web to Google Maps, which contains many of the same capabilities as Google Earth. Using Google Earth or Google Maps, you can view the earth's
surface in other ways to render it in three-dimensions besides through contour lines. For example, shaded relief can be added to the topographic map,
shadows that help distinguish hills and ridges from depressions and valleys. Shaded relief is available in the Google Earth/Google Maps "terrain" view. To
turn on the terrain view you may have to you search in the menu options in Google Earth or Google Maps (try looking under "More.").

GEOLOGY LEARNING OUTCOMES

By performing and completing this lab, you will progress toward the following learning objectives for this course:

Think, behave, and communicate scientifically by writing answers about glaciers and climate change using terminology for glacial landforms and
geologic time.
Show and explain how the earth is constantly active and always changing by analyzing and describing changes to the land and climate of the earth
related to glaciers and climate change.
Identify and describe earth systems and how they interact by discerning and describing connections between changes in the atmosphere, climate,
extent of glacial ice, and life on earth.
Put geologic events in order and determine the age of geologic materials by tracking changes in climate, atmospheric composition, and glaciation
over time and narrating it using geologic time terminology.Interpret spatial and quantitative information with maps and diagrams by analyzing glacial
landforms on topographic maps.
Use measurements, numbers, calculations and graphs to derive meaning from the earth by analyzing climate change on graphs of changes in
temperature and atmospheric composition over time.

METHODS
Read, draw, and interpret maps of the earth.
Examine, construct, and interpret diagrams, flow charts, and tables of information.
Construct or examine graphs to analyze correlations between types of data.

LAB PROCEDURES
There are two parts to this lab: (1) Glacial Landforms, and (2) Ice Core Data.

Refer to the Lab Assignments Grading Rubric for a reminder of what constitutes a well-performed lab.

PART 1: GLACIAL LANDFORMS, A MAP READING EXERCISE

Open the Lituya Bay West U.S. Geologic Survey topographic map snippet (click on image below). It shows a bay on the coast of southeast Alaska, in
Glacier Bay National Park. Glaciation formed Lituya Bay. You may have to click on the opened image to enlarge it to full size.

Solomon Railroad is not a railroad. It is actually part of a glacial landform. What is the name of that type of glacial landform?
Is it an erosional glacial landform, or a depositional one?
Which direction in Lituya Bay did the glacier once flow?
By what processes, erosion or deposition, did the glacier form what is now Lituya Bay? -- in particular, how did the glacier create the higher,
hummocky land surrounding Lituya Bay, which includes Solomon Railroad, and how did the glacier create the depression now occupied by Lituya
Bay?

To see more of the glaciers that now empty into Lituya Bay, open the Lituya Bay East U.S. Geologic Survey topographic map snippet (click on the image
below).

Which glaciers terminate at Lituya Bay, that you can see the names of on the map? (The one you cannot see the name of is Crillon Glacier.)
Recall from studying plate tectonics that southeastern Alaska is a transform plate boundary between the North American and the Pacific plates.
Recall from studying streams that most valleys on earth are the result of stream erosion, and stream-eroded valleys tend to curve and branch. An
exception is fault-controlled valleys, which tend to run in straight lines. As you can see on the map, Desolation Valley, Gilbert Inlet, and Crillon Inlet
together compose a single, straight valley. What specific type of fault is likely to lie beneath this straight valley in southeastern Alaska?
Shown on the Lituya Bay East map are lines and zones of brown dots running down the middle of Lituya Glacier. What is the name of this type of
glacial feature, and how does it form?

Open the Longs Peak U.S. Geologic Survey topographic map snippet. Longs Peak is in Rocky Mountain National Park, Colorado, and its peak elevation
is over 14,000 feet above sea level.

A cirque is an amphitheater-shaped (half-bowl-shaped) valley eroded by a glacier into the side of a mountain. The walls of a cirque are very steep
and curve around as seen on a map in a partial U shape cutting into the side of the mountain. How many cirques can you see on the Longs Peak
Map?
Is a cirque an erosional glacial landform, or a depositional one?
Which mountain on the map is the most complete glacial horn? (All the slopes surrounding it are glacially eroded cirques, and the peak is a
pyramidal prominence, not just a high point on a ridge.)
Look at the ridge that joins Longs Peak to Pagoda Mountain, and the ridge that joins Longs Peak to Storm Peak. What is the specific glacial
landform name for that type of ridge?
On the topographic map, what patterns in the contour lines tell you exactly where the crests of those ridges are?
Are those ridges an erosional glacial landform, or depositional?

Open the Williamson, New York U.S. Geologic Survey topographic map snippet (click on the image below). It shows a flat area of upstate New York that
was glaciated by the Laurentide Ice Sheet late in the Pleistocene Epoch.

Study the contour lines of Prospect Hill on the map. Picture in your mind what the profile of Prospect Hill would look like, if you were looking at it
from the west and dawn was breaking in the sky behind it. Could you sketch the profile on a piece of paper?
Prospect Hill and the hills near Jagger and Lyon Roads are a particular type of glacial landform produced by an ice sheet that flowed over a
relatively flat area. What is this type of glacial landform called?
Is it an erosional glacial landform, or depositional?
Which way was the ice sheet flowing and how can you tell?

LAB PART 2: ICE CORE DATA, ANALYZING REAL DATA

It is convenient for reconstructing geologic history that a glacier consists of layers of ice, which accumulated each year as falling snow. The principle of
superposition applies, so that in theory we can count down the layers from the top to determine how many years ago each layer of ice formed. In reality,
from the upper parts of many of the world's glaciers recent layers are missing due to climate warming, and in the deepest parts of glaciers the ice layers
may be too convoluted by flow of the glacier to be sure that they represent an undisturbed sequence of superposed layers. Therefore, caution and ways
of working around these perturbations to the annual sequence of ice layers must be applied. Ages based on counting annual layers of ice can be
compared with carbon-14 ages of ice back to about 50,000 years ago for calibration and verification, and the deep layers can be examined to make sure
they have not been folded and disturbed from their original sequence.

Another convenient aspect of glaciers is that each layer of ice contains information about what was in earth's atmosphere during the year the snow fell.
The ice, being frozen water, comprises atoms of hydrogen and oxygen, and we can use the ratios of isotopes of hydrogen and carbon to estimate such
environmental conditions as global average temperature at the time the snow fell. In addition, bubbles of air became trapped in each layer of ice as the
snow turned into glacial ice. Those bubbles act as tiny time capsules of earth's atmosphere at the time the snow fell. From these bubbles of air trapped in
the layers of glacial ice, we can measure the concentration of carbon dioxide (CO2) that was in the air at that time.

From data like the ones just described, we can analyze whether or not variations in the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere correlate with changes in the
average temperature of earth's atmosphere. According to greenhouse gas theory, higher CO2 concentrations should correlate with higher global
temperature, and lower CO2 concentrations should correlate with lower global temperatures.

In this part of the lab, you will work with ice core data from the East Antarctic Ice Sheet, the ice sheet that covers most of the continent of Antarctica and is
the biggest, thickest glacier in the modern world. The ice core is from a drilling operation that went over two miles deep at the Vostok research station in
Antarctica, reaching deep in the glacier to layers of ice about 420,000 years old.

(The data in the following two graphs comes from the publication by Petit, J.R., J. Jouzel, D. Raynaud, N.I. Barkov, J.M. Barnola, I. Basile, M. Bender, J.
Chappellaz, J. Davis, G. Delaygue, M. Delmotte, V.M. Kotlyakov, M. Legrand, V. Lipenkov, C. Lorius, L. Pepin, C. Ritz, E. Saltzman, and M. Stievenard.
1999. Climate and atmospheric history of the past 420,000 years from the Vostok Ice Core, Antarctica. Nature volume 399: pages 429-436.)

Examine the following graph (click on the image below).

What does its horizontal axis show?

What does its vertical axis show?
If a temperature on the graph is at a value of zero, does that mean it is at the freezing point of water, which is 0° on the Celsius scale?
If not, what does 0 on the temperature scale mean?

Think of -3 °C as a baseline on the graph.

Where the temperature on the graph is below -3 °C, the earth was in a cold, glacial stage, with gigantic ice sheets growing in North America and
Scandinavia-northern Europe and much more glaciation in mountain ranges than on earth today.

Where the temperature on the graph is above -3 °C, the earth was in a warm, interglacial interval of time, like it has been for about the last 10,000 years,
with the North American and Scandinavian-northern European ice sheets melting away.

Has the earth been in glacial and interglacial conditions for about the same amount of time during the last 420,000 years?
Does the earth go into cold, glacial intervals at the same pace that it warms up and comes out of them?
Describe the pace and manner in which the earth cools into glacial intervals and the pace and manner in which it heats into warmer, interglacial
intervals.

Now look at the next graph (click on the image below). It shows CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere over the last 420,000 years, extracted from the
Vostok ice core. The CO2 concentrations are given in parts per million (ppm).

(Note on ppm: Parts per million, or ppm, is similar to percentage, %. The difference is that percentage is parts per one hundred rather than per million. To
put it another way, a value of 1 ppm is equal to a percentage of 0.0001 %, the decimal point being moved four places to the left to change from parts per
million to parts per one hundred.)

Think of a CO2 value of 230 ppm on the graph as a baseline. The amount of CO2 in the atmosphere was relatively low when its concentration was less
than 230 ppm, relatively high when its concentration was above 230 ppm.

Do times of low atmospheric CO2 on the carbon dioxide graph correspond to the times of cold glacial stages seen on the temperature graph?

We are living in the Holocene epoch, which began at the end of the last glacial stage of the Pleistocene epoch, close to 11,700 years ago. The average
amount of CO2 in the atmosphere during the Holocene epoch was close to 280 ppm up until about 1780 AD. The amount of CO2 in the atmosphere today
is above 385 ppm and keeps rising each year. These recent high values of CO2 in the atmosphere are not depicted in the Vostok ice core data, which
stops around 250 years BP.

Where would a CO2 concentration of 385 ppm fall on the carbon dioxide vs. age graph?

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Course Information | Basics | Basics Tables | Glossary | Grading Rubrics | Labs | Term Projects

Geology 101 - Introduction to Physical Geology

Lab--Glaciers & Ice Ages
Created by Ralph L. Dawes, Ph.D. and Cheryl D. Dawes, including figures unless otherwise noted
updated: 9/11/13

Unless otherwise specified, this work by Washington State Colleges is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License.