What are kettles?
Kettles form when an ice block from a retreating ice margin is buried and melts, leaving behind a depression. Kettles lakes, which form when these depressions are filled by groundwater, are one of the most abundant lake types on our planet and the formation of these landforms is directly related to paleoice distribution, ice margin dynamics, and proglacial depositional processes.
Yet, despite how widespread kettle depressions are on the landscape, we lack a fundamental understanding of how ice burial impacts resultant depression morphology and landscape roughness.
Project Framing
“KEtTLE”: Key Equations for depression morphology from ice buried at the glacial Terminus using Lab-based Experimentation
This project uses laboratory experiments and structure from motion photogrammetry to create kettle depressions in the lab, generate digital elevation models of resulting surface topography, and compare laboratory parameters to real-world kettle landscapes.
Undergraduate Research: Laboratory Experiments at Dartmouth College
This work is being completed by two Dartmouth undergraduate research students: Lang Burgess and Laura Wilson. The project builds upon research completed by Jillian Prescott and Professor Luke Zoet at University of Wisconsin Madison (Prescott et al., 2024). So far we have successfully run a number of experiments and are in the early phases of comparing our resulting topography to real landscapes in northern Alaska, Greenland, and Wisconsin.
