Establish a respectful and inclusive community of geoscientists studying Quaternary glaciation in the Western United States that promotes sharing of new research, ideas, and data products. 

Generate a complete digital inventory of verifiable, attributable, and spatially referenced Pleistocene paleoglacier outlines suitable for use in scientific research and education.

Maintain a forum and data management infrastructure for sharing research and mapping products.

The 2025 winter speaker series is taking place in February/March. Click on the titles below to view recorded presentations on YouTube:

Feb. 14: Accelerating Glacier Shrinkage Across the Americas (Bethan Davies, Newcastle University)

Feb. 20: Updates for the Paleoglaciers Working Group (Ben Laabs, co-organizer), New age constraints reveal moraine stabilization thousands of years after deposition during the last deglaciation of western New York, USA (Karlee Prince, University at Buffalo)

Feb. 28: Are Rock Glaciers Water Sources or Water Processors? (Olivia Stanley, University of Colorado-Boulder), Automated Mapping of Rock Glaciers Using Image Segmentation with Deep Learning (Alex Takoudes, Middlebury College)

March 6: Modeling and Morphometric Analysis of the Palaeoclimatic Effects of Current and Former Glaciers in Northeast Türkiye (Onur Halis, University of Tennessee-Knoxville)

March 14: Mountain glacier extents of the Last Glacial Maximum (Augusto Lima, University of Bergen), Post-glacial landscape evolution in the San Juan Mountains (Brad Johnson, Davidson University)

If you are interested in presenting to the working group or would like to attend live presentations via Zoom (4 pm Eastern/1 pm Pacific on the dates shown), please contact Ben Laabs.

The 2023 and 2024 winter speaker series featured Zoom talks by researchers studying paleoglaciers in the western U.S. and elsewhere. Recordings of talks can be viewed on YouTube: 2023 playlist, 2024 playlist.

The Paleoglaciers Workshop was held at the University of Utah Department of Geology and Geophysics on Nov. 8-11, 2023. The workshop focused on the development of the Western U.S. Paleoglaciers Database and related tools and databases to maximize its value to the research community. The database is being updated and a new version will be released in 2025.

We are in the process of launching a prototype database of Western U.S. paleoglaciers as digitized polygons. The database is available as a Web Feature Service for use in a geographic information system. Right click here for the WFS link.

ArcGIS users can also connect to the database as a publicly available hosted feature layer. The feature layer is titled “Western US Paleoglacier Outlines”.

To contribute paleoglacier outlines to the database, please contact Ben Laabs. 

Interested in joining or following the working group? Complete the Google Form or contact Ben Laabs. 

Looking for paleoglacier extents beyond the western United States? Check out AntarcticGlaciers.org and the Alaska PaleoGlacier Atlas.

Visit the ICE-D Alpine project to find cosmogenic nuclide data and exposure ages of glacial deposits in the western U.S. and beyond.