QUANTITATIVE MORPHOLOGICAL ANALYSIS OF THE PETERBOROUGH DRUMLIN FIELD USING GIS

The Peterborough Drumlin field, located in southern Ontario, Canada, covers an area of over 5000km2 and has been the subject of numerous papers speculating on the mechanisms responsible for the formation of drumlins including the erosion of pre-existing landforms, fluvial deposition in subglacial cavities and subglacial bed deformation. This poster presents a quantitative analysis of the morphological characteristics, geological setting and spatial relationships of drumlins in the Peterborough drumlin field in order to provide a reliable database that may be used to determine their depositional origin. Several thousand individual drumlins, with varying morphological characteristics, were analyzed using the Geographic Information Systems (GIS) software ArcGIS 8.3 and ArcView 3.2 as well as the statistical package SPSS13.0. Drumlin morphology data were derived from 10m resolution Digital Elevation Model (DEM) data made available by the Ontario Geospatial Data Exchange (OGDE), using the ArcGIS Geowizards extension. Morphological characteristics of the drumlins used in the analysis include length, circularity, area-perimeter ratio, orientation and shape. The resulting drumlin characteristic database was also analyzed to identify relationships between drumlin form and the spatial distribution of glacial sediment types, glacial sediment thickness and bedrock geology. These factors may play an important role in the genesis of extensive drumlin fields.