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 2024 winter speaker series is taking place in February/March. Click on the titles below to view recorded presentations on YouTube:

Feb. 8: Updates for the Working Group (Ben Laabs)

Feb. 16: Deglaciation in Yosemite following the Last Glacial Maximum (Yueyi Che, Stanford University), Geochronology of the Okanogan Lobe of the CIS (Joel Gombiner, University of Washington)

Feb. 22: Holocene glacier minima in the western U.S. (Andy Jones, University of Wisconsin-Madison), Late Pleistocene glaciation and tectonics in the Teton Range (Alia Lesnek, Queens College)

March 1: Glacier changes in High Mountain Asia (Matt Olson, Utah Valley University), Little Ice Age moraine dating in High Mountain Asia (Yanan Li, Texas State 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 Paleoglaciers Workshop was held at the University of Utah Department of Geology and Geophysics on Nov. 8-11. 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 2023 winter speaker series featured Zoom talks by researchers studying paleoglaciers in the western U.S. Recordings of talks can be viewed on YouTube.

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. 

The Alaska Paleoglacier Atlas includes a complete set of Pleistocene paleoglacier polygons and represents the types of products being generated and compiled by the working group.

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