Subglacial Bedforms; Drumlins; Flutes; Ribbed or Rogen Moraine; Mega-scale Glacial Lineations (MSGL)

This website is part of project funded by the Natural Environment Research Council of the UK on Testing the instability theory of subglacial bedform production. Chris Clark, Andrew Fowler, Richard Hindmarsh, Chris Stokes, Felix Ng, Matteo Spagnolo, Heike Gramberg, Paul Dunlop Anna Hughes, and Sarah Greenwood have all been working on the project either mapping and measuring bedforms to learn about their properties or by developing theoretical and numerical models of how they might form. We list some publications further below.

On the left hand menu are some definitions written a while ago, that are now getting rather dated, but provide a simple and general idea of the properties of these landforms and thoughts of how they might be generated (pictures included);

So what do we mean by an instability theory of subglacial bedform generation?

Okay, but how does an instability in a system produce landforms with a pattern?

A Drumlin bibliography To aid drumlin researchers in the Downloads section on the right is a list of over 500 publications that we know of. Please help us update it.

Also in the Downloads section are some of our own papers on subglacial bedforms, with abstracts.

But if you really want to know how drumlins form then check out the short movie in Downloads that shows, for the first time, geophysical observations of a drumlin initiating from a flat plane and growing into the classical half-egg shape. The landforming process took just over 2.5 hours, and we have compressed this evolution into time-lapse movie of less than two minutes.

Chris Clark
University of Sheffield, 2009.