Collaborative Research on Till Deformation: Linking Microstructural Characteristics to Strain

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0136006IversonThis is a collaborative proposal by Principal Investigators at Iowa State University and the Wisconsin Geological Survey. Past glaciers, including the Pleistocene ice sheets of the Northern Hemisphere, sometimes flowed unusually fast, causing ice-mass fluctuations that resulted in severe climate change and landscape modification. A leading hypothesis attributes this rapid flow to deformation of the thawed glacier substrate. Structures preserved in the sediment beds of past ice sheets can provide a time-integrated and spatially extensive record of such deformation and can be used to test this hypothesis. Microstructures are potentially the most useful indicators of deformation, because they evolve systematically and are ubiquitous, even in massive till units. Although microstructural characteristics of deformed glacier sediments have been described extensively, there have been no methodical efforts to correlate these characteristics to shear-strain magnitude. The result is that the degree of bed deformation, and hence its role in ice-sheet motion, usually cannot be inferred reliably from the geologic record. Support is being requested to study the evolution of till microstructural characteristics as a function of shear strain with a ring-shear device that deforms a large sediment specimen to high strains. The experiments will be guided by related studies in structural geology, geophysics, and soil mechanics, which indicate that shear-plane orientations, clay-particle fabric, and anisotropy of magnetic susceptibility (AMS) change systematically with sediment deformation. These microstructural characteristics will be correlated with shear strain by conducting experiments to various strains and measuring these characteristics after each test. Two basal tills with different clay-mineral fractions will be tested and the sensitivity of the results to initial consolidation and total normal stress will be studied. Shear planes will be identified optically and the extent of Y-shear development relative to shears at other orientations, an indicator of shear-strain magnitude, will be quantified. Clay-particle fabrics will be measured with an X-ray, pole-figure goniometer at the University of Michigan and quantified by computing both eigenvalues and March strains. AMS will be measured at the Institute for Rock Magnetism at the University of Minnesota and used to compute AMS magnitudes, as well as strengths and directions of fabrics defined by orientations of maximum susceptibility. These experiments will help improve models of past ice sheets and interpretations of glacigenic sediments and landforms. This research may also help solve related problems in structural geology, geophysics, petroleum geology and geotechnical engineering, in which deformation of granular media and consequent anisotropy are often central issues.