November 4, 2016

Nearly 20,000 years ago, glaciers sculpted the mountains surrounding Breckenridge and delivered sediment and gold to the rivers below.

This link between glaciers and the gold still being discovered is the subject of a free public talk titled “Mountains, Gold and Glaciers” at 9 a.m. on Nov. 16 in the auditorium at Colorado Mountain College in Breckenridge, 107 Denison Placer Road. Robert Anderson, a geology professor at the University of Colorado Boulder and researcher at the Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research, will talk about the geologic and climatic history of the Breckenridge area.

“There are many hundreds of rock glaciers in the state dotting the alpine valleys. Where they are, how they move, and how they help to sculpt the modern landscape are questions we are currently addressing,” Anderson said.

“We aim to understand how glaciers work, so that we can better interpret their signature in the landscape,” he said.

Anderson explained that glaciers carve the alpine valleys into tell-tale shapes, leaving behind footprints in the form of piles of rocks called moraines. From these landforms, geologists try to determine what the climate must have been like 20,000 years ago, including how much it snowed and how much colder it was then.

“We are also exploring the modern landscape for its smaller hidden glaciers, which live beneath cloaks of rocks and are called rock glaciers,” he said.

Anderson’s research interests include the mechanics and timing of landscape evolution, the modeling of landform evolution, glaciology, Arctic and alpine landscape evolution, and coastal evolution. He has been a professor at CU Boulder since 2003.