Project KEtTLE (Undergraduate Research Project)

Kettle Depressions: understudied, yet key features on post-glacial landscapes

Kettles depressions form when an ice block from a retreating ice margin is buried and melts, leaving behind a depression at the landscape surface. Kettle lakes form when these depressions are filled by groundwater and are one of the most abundant lake types on our planet. The formation of these landforms is directly related to paleoice distribution, ice margin dynamics, and proglacial depositional processes.

Process for kettle formation. A) Ice block is entrained in sediment, B) ongoing glacial outwash bury ice bock, C) Melted ice leaves depression at the surface.

Yet, despite how widespread kettle depressions are on the landscape, we lack fundamental understanding of how ice burial processes shape resulting depression morphology and landscape roughness. Understanding this relationship can help us understand glacial retreat of the past and post-glacial landscape evolution of the future.

Project Framing

“KEtTLE”: Key Equations for depression morphology from ice buried at the glacial Terminus using Lab-based Experimentation

Prepping a laboratory experiment to generate kettle depressions. We first smooth the surface using a level before burying our ice spheres at a set depth.

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

Dartmouth undergraduate research student Lang Burgess with two spherical ice molds used for our experiments.

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).

Leveling the sandbox before an experiment. After the experiment is completed, we collect images for structure from motion photogrammetry to generate a digital elevation model of the sandbox surface.

Using structure from motion photogrammetry, we have generated DEMs of our preliminary laboratory experiments and are in the early phases of comparing our resulting topography to real landscapes in northern Alaska, Greenland, and Wisconsin.

Kettle Experiment DEM showing resulting depressions from a grid of buried ice spheres.