Lewington, E., Livingstone, S. orcid.org/0000-0002-7240-5037, Sole, A. et al. (2 more authors) (2019) An automated method for mapping geomorphological expressions of former subglacial meltwater pathways (hummock corridors) from high resolution digital elevation data. Geomorphology, 339. pp. 70-86. ISSN 0169-555X
Abstract
Elongated tracts of hummocks or ‘hummock corridors’, exposed on palaeo-ice sheet beds, are believed to represent former subglacial meltwater pathways. Here, we present a method, coded in MATLAB, for automatically detecting and mapping hummock corridors from high-resolution digital elevation models (DEMs). Initially the DEM is filtered to remove bed roughness outside the size range of hummocks. A Fast Fourier Transform is then performed to determine the dominant orientation of hummock corridors and remove misaligned features. Finally, image segmentation is used to isolate and extract the hummock corridors as a binary mask. We tested this automated approach visually and statistically against detailed manual mapping in three areas of Canada and northern Scandinavia. Results show that while the automated method does not perfectly reproduce the manual mapping, it successfully captures the general configuration, morphometry (length, width) and location of hummock corridors, despite variation in expression across and between sites. This technique is ideally suited to take advantage of newly available high-resolution digital elevation data (e.g. the ArcticDEM), whose enormous volume makes large-scale manual mapping prohibitively time consuming. Its application will enable efficient and comprehensive mapping of the spatial distribution of hummock corridors across palaeo-beds that is necessary for deriving insights into their formation and the organisation of subglacial meltwater flow beneath ice sheets.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © 2019 Elsevier. This is an author produced version of a paper subsequently published in Geomorphology. Uploaded in accordance with the publisher's self-archiving policy. Article available under the terms of the CC-BY-NC-ND licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/). |
Keywords: | Subglacial hydrology; Palaeo-ice sheets; Automated landform mapping; High resolution digital elevation data |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Sheffield |
Academic Units: | The University of Sheffield > Faculty of Social Sciences (Sheffield) > Department of Geography (Sheffield) |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Sheffield |
Date Deposited: | 29 Apr 2019 09:21 |
Last Modified: | 25 Nov 2021 12:06 |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | Elsevier |
Refereed: | Yes |
Identification Number: | 10.1016/j.geomorph.2019.04.013 |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:145204 |
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Filename: Automatic mapping of hummock corridors - accepted paper 2019.pdf
Licence: CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0