Landforms in focus; riding the wave of increasing spatial resolution

In this Ralph Alger Bagnold medal lecture I will present a tour of the world’s mighty and kilometers-thick ice sheets that existed in the last glacial. The journey will take us to palaeo ice sheets of North America, Greenland, Britain and Ireland, Scandinavia, northern Europe, Russia and Antarctica.  Having looked at glacial landforms in all these locations I will attempt to show what they tell us about processes of formation and the functioning of ice sheets.  There are some important lessons to help us forecast future ice sheets and sea level. For example, to what extent does the history of an ice sheet matter for its future dynamics and change? A theme will be on my four-decade journey, riding the wave of increasing spatial resolution which started with peering into the gloom of fuzzy satellite images. I will show that the renaissance in mapping, description and untangling of landform patterns have been pivotal in advancing knowledge. Further themes will include: the troublesome problem of scale; building large geomorphological and geochronological databases; reconciling field to continental-scale observations; numerical modelling of landform creation; and recent advances on integrating numerical ice sheet modelling approaches with empirical data sets.

I am likely to reflect (or rant) on some diversions such as on the third referee, the freedom of PhD research against grant deliverables, the need to study nature not books, that it takes a long time and many people to make progress on hard problems, and on the importance to geomorphology of a wide diversity of researchers in how they think.