Opportunities for geomorphological and glaciological research from the Arctic-wide high resolution ArcticDEM

• Main Author: Stuber, Julian
• Format: Master Thesis
• Language: English
• Published: 2022
• Subjects: Institute of Geography; 910 Geography & travel; Arctic; McCann; Northwest Territories
• Online Access: https://www.zora.uzh.ch/id/eprint/234311/; https://www.zora.uzh.ch/id/eprint/234311/1/Thesis_Stuber.pdf; https://doi.org/10.5167/uzh-234311

The ArcticDEM presents an interesting opportunity for research. By uniting knowledge and methods from geomorphometry and glaciology, this vast data source can help reconstructing features such as eskers, which are found in beds of paleo-ice sheets. This in turn can contribute to a deeper understanding and more accurate models of glacier dynamics. Using a region growing algorithm (Adams and Bischof (1994), Straumann and Purves (2008), Bechtel, Ringeler, and Böhner (2008)) a map of Canadian eskers should be generated and compared to existing work in the same area. The approach presented in this thesis is capable of extracting esker segments as a whole. Within a defined study area in the McCann Lake Area in Northwest Territories, the results show >50% accuracy in regards to a reference map of Canadian eskers. Furthermore, existing recent applications from the ArcticDEM in related research fields are discussed.