Climate change and warming have been linked to enhanced coastal erosion in the arctic. Specifically, permafrost is believed to be thawing at greater rates, and wave dynamics are expected to increase in intensity. As a result, thermokarst activity, which includes the occurrence of retrogressive thaw slumps, will be more frequent along arctic coasts. / The availability of airborne and spaceborne imagery in the arctic over the last fifty years has made possible the temporal analysis of permafrost and ground ice-related erosion. The objectives of this thesis are (1) the creation of a large scale database for horizontal coastal retreat on Herschel Island for the 1952-2000 timespan, (2) the investigation of retrogressive thaw slump activity over the same period and its relation to coastal erosion, and (3) the elaboration of stereophotogrammetric techniques to investigate retrogressive thaw slump activity volumetrically. Herschel Island, located on the northern coast of the Yukon Territory, was chosen as the study site for this research, because of the widespread presence of retrogressive thaw slumps and the lack of data for coastal erosion during the last fifty years. / Photogrammetric tools were used to create orthorectified and stereo-images of the Island for the years 1952, 1970, 2000 and 2004 from airphoto archives and Ikonos (1 m resolution) imagery. Coastal erosion was found to be stable or declining on Herschel Island except in the vicinity of retrogressive thaw slumps. In addition, retrogressive thaw slumps were identified on the imagery and observed to have increased in frequency for the 1952-2000 period. / Stereophotogrammetric analysis of two retrogressive thaw slumps showed that eroded sediment volumes from these landforms are considerable and should be included in future assessments of sediment release from arctic coasts to the oceanic shelves.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:QMM.82270 |
| Date | January 2004 |
| Creators | Lantuit, Hugues |
| Publisher | McGill University |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Coverage | Master of Science (Department of Geography.) |
| Rights | All items in eScholarship@McGill are protected by copyright with all rights reserved unless otherwise indicated. |
| Relation | alephsysno: 002223722, proquestno: AAIMR12481, Theses scanned by UMI/ProQuest. |
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