Streamlined Landforms in Sweden: Core Types, Log-Normal Distributions and the Geomorphological Continuum

English Abstract:

The newly available Swedish National Height Model is a 2.0 m horizontal, and 0.01 m vertical, resolution digital elevation model (DEM) that is free at the point of use for researchers based at Swedish institutions. With coverage currently at ~90% of the country and due to be completed by 2015 this spatially extensive, high resolution, dataset has opened up new avenues of research for Quaternary geology in the country. The work presented here utilises the new DEM to map and evaluate more than 10,000 glacially streamlined landforms. The extracted morphological variables of length, width and height are then used to test recent conclusions drawn from the glacially streamlined landscape of Great Britain and North America/Canada, to assess the impact of different core types on the morphological expression of said features.

It is found that in common with drumlins found in the British Isles their characteristics can be described by a log-normal distribution, however the long tail of the features characteristic distributions a cause problems for statistical methods of evaluation. Furthermore a re-appraisal of some conclusions drawn by previous works as to the presence of a fundamental scaling law in streamlined feature elongation is necessary. Additionally; based on a limited sample size it has been found that it is not possible to differentiate a streamlined landform’s core type based on their morphological characteristics taken as whole. However the length metric does show differences between core types, and therefore may bear further investigation.