Northern Colorado Glacier Records
Precise records of glacier activity following the Last Glacial Maximum are surprisingly sparse in the Colorado Rocky Mountains. Specifically, when glaciers began to regrow after deglaciation is still largely unknown. Teaming up with colleagues at the University of Colorado Boulder I have recently started a project aimed at reconstructing deglaciation and Holocene regrowth of alpine glaciers using cosmogenic radionuclide dating of moraine boulders and glacial erratics.
To the left is an animation of a glacier model run simulating ice retreat in the study valley following an LGM equilibrium extent. By iterating through linear warming rates I was able to constrain the average warming rate necessary to have ice retreat between the two sampled erratic boulders (white squares) in the measured amount of time (~1000 yrs).