PERIGLACIATION RESOURCES & IDEAS

Updated September 2007 - first update for 2 years, and got rid of several dead links...

• A feature which always captures the imagination is the PINGO, particularly found on the improbably named TUKTOYAKTUK PENINSULA where there are one of the 2 types of Pingo. The others are named after the MACKENZIE DELTA. 6th form students love the contrast between the closed and open-system pingos. I remember a 6th form student party where someone baked a pingo cake and covered it in green icing. These areas are explorable using Google Earth. Remember that PINGO is Inuit for 'hill', and so Pingos on the map are

• An excellent set of LECTURE NOTES with links to pictures here from a Canadian Regina University site (click the course outline tab for links to some other physical areas - this has been around a long time !)

• The ecosystem which develops on permafrost is called TUNDRA.

• There are some excellent Canadian sites on this area, for which I'm indebted to my anonymous Canadian friend, but this is one of the better collection of TUNDRA links - you should find what you want here. Tundra biomes are very fragile: the track of a vehicle can persist for decades, and any damage is very slow to mend. With very few bacteria, things don't decompose as they do elsewhere so regolith tends to stay as regolith rather than developing into soil.

• There are some useful materials in the Garrett and Witterick book: 'Cold Environments'.  These include some useful sources of data for questions on PERIGLACIATION which appear on a new addition to the site.

• An excellent book which I have (not sure if it's out of print now...) is a little pamphlet in a series called 'Environmental Systems' published by Evans publishing. It's called 'Polar Ice and Periglacial Lands' and is by that old faithful D.C. MONEY. It has some useful questions for discussion and a glossary of terms. ISBN is 0 237 29266 1 if you want to try and get hold of it.

• The website of the TRANS ALASKAN (ALYESKA) PIPELINE has a whole range of resources relating to Permafrost and the way in which the pipeline was built so as to reduce its impact on the permafrost. There are plenty of photos and other information to download for your delectation. Find out all about TAPS, and how it has been designed for minimum environmental impact.

A useful report appeared on the BBC News site in January 2003. It referred to PATTERNED GROUND, which is a very common feature of periglacial areas such as the Tuktoyaktuk peninsula in northern Canada. The item was available from the BBC page HERE, and described an article published in SCIENCE magazine, the cover of which features a striking image of the landforms, which were from SVALBARD.

Click to see a larger image of the cover of the magazine. Better still, why not order a back issue...

The landforms cover the ground in parts of Alaska and Spitsbergen. The circles in the picture above are due to cycles of freezing and thawing, according to Mark Kessler of UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, Santa Cruz. The cover shows raised rings of stones surrounding circular fine grained domains. The circle in the foreground of the picture is around 2m in diameter. Various processes had been proposed before (I was under the impression that the ones in the textbooks were the actual ones...) Kessler proposes a mechanism for "sorted patterned ground". He used computer models to show that there were 2 processes involved: lateral sorting and squeezing of stone domains, all within the parameters of different slopes.

Head for GLACIER BAY in ALASKA. Pingos are available to be viewed at Eskerdalen on Svalbard.

• Periglacial landforms can be found in the CAIRNGORMS. I did a few searches, and you can feel free to visit my CAIRNGORMS page. This is a useful case study area for a range of processes. Head for the Lairig Ghru for some pro-talus ramparts. A little technical for some perhaps. The A2 course has reduced the landforms that pupils need to know about. Alas.... (that's a periglacial joke...)

• There are many problems for those people living in periglacial areas. (See below for links to more sites...) This is quite likely to form the basis for questions on the Synoptic paper (Unit 6 of the AS/A2) on the effect of processes on people and vice versa.

• Probably the best set of notes relating to is this Canadian site: PERGELISOLS and all... http://gsc.nrcan.gc.ca/permafrost/index_e.php (NEW URL)

• TAIGA NET has some useful articles in its archive. Your YUKON is the name of the column - good picture of pingo.

• The CRYOSPHERE site here: 'Where the world is frozen'... very dramatic.

Periglacial Processes and Landforms (by former colleague Mr. Nunnerley)

Recap:

Permafrost: the deep, permanent freezing of the subsoil and underlying rock

Permafrost is characteristic of periglacial environments.

Some environments that exist in Britain today show evidence of former periglacial conditions.

Think about local examples to Norfolk, where we have patterned ground, and even PINGOS.

OYMYAKON: POLE OF COLD

One case study that we do with the U6 students is to use Nick Middleton's excellent 'GOING TO EXTREMES' episode on COLD. This looks at some aspects of living in very cold temperatures: the lowest temperatures ever recorded were here in this Siberian town which sits in a bowl surrounded by mountains, in a HIGH pressure area, so that cold air drains into the bottom of the bowl due to KATABATIC winds.

To get a good ILLUSTRATED perspective on this place, visit JARMO MOILANEN's WEBSITE. He has a diary of a trip lasting several months into the area at his website HERE. There are some good photographs to give the feel of the remoteness of the city, and problems with the extreme cold.

The Nick Middleton video includes several useful examples of the effect of cold on the people who live in the area. I show the 40 minutes or so starting with him shopping for clothing, and including his trip into the Jana river with the local 'WALRUS' club, the trip to Oymyakon, the 'road of bones', the arrival, and finishing with the testing of the theory that if he goes uphill the temperature will get warmer rather than colder due to the INVERSION that sits over Oymyakon.

Snippets to mention which are useful 'background' detail for any essay on this area include:

• Having to plug engine overnight, and light a fire to warm up all the moving parts, or get the fuel moving

• Spectacles breaking because of the cold

• Wires go brittle and snap

• Pipes and houses in Yakutsk built on stilts above the permafrost

• Temperature Inversion mentioned above

• Having to eat a diet of meat to keep the body going in the temperatures - not many vegetarians locally

• Importance of heat, without which everything would stop within about 4 hours

• Bodies moving up through the ground - difficulty in digging graves

• The Kolyma highway - 'road of bones'

• Ice roads across the Jana river

Look out for repeats on the BBC's UK satellite channels...

The Russian YAKUTIA travel company offer a trip to Oymyakon from Yakutsk airport, with the message: "Note: the trip can be difficult for females". Not sure why...

KNOCK and LOCHAN TOPOGRAPHY

Cnoc / Lochan

Cnoc = low rounded hill, lochan = small lake

The Outer Hebrides were subjected to glaciation during the last ice advance. The ice scraped away the soil, and periglacial processes and lowland glacial erosion rounded and sculpted the landscape. Erosion is often associated with glacial uplands: cirque, arete, trough etc., but also occurs in lowland areas. The landscape is rounded, and there is very little vegetation. The local rock is gneiss (sounds like 'nice')

This superb image, which shows the effect of the erosion on the landscape of Harris and Lewis is from IAN MURRAY's GEOGRAPHYPHOTOS site. If you have some Geography images, why not donate them... then everyone can benefit from them.

WINDOWS ON THE WORLD

Supported by RGS-IBG Innovative Geography Teaching Grant (as are some other fine projects...)

Cars plugged in to heaters to allow them to start... Image from Windows on the World.

SOME IDEAS

FLIPBOOKS

A flipbook is easily made with small pieces of card piled up and then stapled and taped together. They should each contain a simple diagram which is slowly altered with each successive still picture. This will then produce a simple animation when it is flipped. I tried this recently using Frost Heave processes as the basis, but ice wedge formation is just as good for these.

The key aspect of most PERIGLACIAL landscapes is the repetition of FREEZE-THAW cycles either side of freezing point. The real factor which causes this landscape is a simple process:

FREEZE & THAW

EXPANSION & CONTRACTION

There are various FLIPBOOK MAKERS which can be obtained via the Internet. Some of these are FLASH based and very simple. You could also try some stop motion animation as suggested by Tony Cassidy on his site, using Plasticine or other modelling materials.

SVALBARD

Check out the resources I have added recently on the archipelago of Svalbard, which has a range of periglacial features.

RETURN TO A2 COLD ENVIRONMENTS