Talk
Changing Permafrost Landscapes

Preliminary modelling of ground ice abundance in the Slave Geological Province

Online pre-recorded

Author(s)

H.B. O'Neill (Presenting)
Geological Survey of Canada
S.A. Wolfe
Geological Survey of Canada
C. Duchesne
Geological Survey of Canada

New infrastructure corridors within the Slave Geological Province will provide transportation, hydro, and communications links to mineral-rich areas of northern Canada, and connect southern highway systems and Arctic shipping routes. Relatively little information on permafrost and ground ice is available compared to other regions. Ice-rich tills have been observed in the region and preserved buried ice has also been documented within glaciofluvial sediments. Improved knowledge of permafrost and ground ice conditions in the region is required to inform the planning and management of infrastructure. Work within the Geological Survey of Canada’s (GSC) GEM-GeoNorth program includes mapping periglacial terrain features, synthesizing existing permafrost and surficial data, and modelling ground ice conditions along the transportation corridor. Here we present initial modelling of ground ice abundance using a methodology developed for national-scale mapping for the Ground ice map of Canada. In contrast with the previous mapping that uses a nationwide surficial materials dataset, we use larger-scale standardized information from GSC Canadian Geoscience Maps (CGM) as model input. We compare outputs for the region derived from the two surficial datasets to assess the influence of surficial geology mapping scale on predicted ground ice abundance. The larger-scale CGM datasets include a greater representation of unconsolidated sediments that may contain ground ice, and consequently, the assessed ground ice abundance is considerably higher than represented on the Ground ice map of Canada. Therefore, estimates from the Ground ice map of Canada should be viewed as conservative for this region and other terrain of the Canadian Shield.