Effects of Glacial Isostatic Adjustment on Surface Topography, Flow Accumulation, Stream Power & Sediment Transport Indexes in the Canadian Prairies

Glacial Isostatic Adjustment (GIA) induced by the melting of the Pleistocene Ice Sheets causes differential land uplift, relative sea level and geoid changes. Thus, GIA in North America may affect water flow-accumulation and the rate of sedimentation and erosion in the South Saskatchewan River Basin (SSRB), but so far this has not been well investigated.

 

Our aim here is to use surface topography in the SSRB and simple models of surface water flow to compute flow-accumulation, wetness index, stream power index and sediment transport index - the latter two affect the rates of erosion and sedimentation. Since the river basin became virtually ice-free around 8 ka BP, we shall study the effects of GIA induced differential land uplift during the last 8 ka on these indexes.

 

Using the present-day surface topography ETOPO1 model, we see that the stream power index and sediment transport index in the SSRB may not be high enough to alter the surface topography significantly today and probably during the last 8 ka except for places around the Rocky Mountains. The effect of using 1 and 3 arc minute grid resolution of the ETOPO1 model does not significantly alter the value of these indexes. However, we note that using 1 arc minute grid is much more computationally intensive, so only a smaller area of the SSRB can be included in the computation.

 

Next, we assume that sedimentation and erosion did not occur in the SSRB during the last 8 ka BP, and the change in surface topography is only due to GIA induced differential uplift. We use land uplift predicted by a large number of GIA models to study the changes in stream power & sediment transport indexes in the last 8 ka BP. Our base GIA model is ICE6G_C(VM5a). Then we investigate the effects of using uplift predicted by other GIA models that can still fit the observed relative sea level (RSL), uplift rate and gravity-rate-of-change data in North America reasonably well. These alternate GIA models have lateral heterogeneity in the mantle and lithosphere included – in particular we test those that give the largest differential uplift in the SSRB. We found that the effect of these other GIA earth models is not large on the stream power & sediment transport indexes. Finally, we investigate the sensitivity of these indexes on the ice models that are consistent with GIA observations. The results of this study will be useful to our understanding of water flow accumulation, sedimentation and erosion in the past, present and future and for water resource management in North America.