Glacial meltwater landforms of central British Columbia

Please click here to download the map associated with this article. The Cordilleran Ice Sheet (CIS), which grew and melted repeatedly across the mountain ranges of westernmost Canada during the late Cenozoic, has imprinted its legacy in the form of glacial landforms, such as meltwater landforms. However, despite their abundance, a coherent effort to map meltwater landforms has been lacking. Here, we present a first regional geomorphological map of glacial meltwater landforms of central British Columbia. Series of well-developed meltwater channels occur at higher elevations on the Interior Plateau, in marginal ranges east of the Coast Mountains, in the Skeena and Omineca mountains, and, in much lower abundances, in the Rocky Mountains. Single-ridged eskers, that in direction are consistent with the regional ice flow direction from glacial lineations, occur in elevated areas of the Interior Plateau. Multiple-ridged larger eskers and esker complexes are, on the other hand, confined to the main topographic lows. The geographical distribution of meltwater landforms is a new reliable dataset for use in palaeoglaciological reconstructions and inference of late glacial ice sheet dynamics in central British Columbia.