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Bernard Hallet Professor Office: Johnson Hall 365    (Mailing Address) Phone: 206-685-2409 Fax: 206-543-3836 (shared) E-Mail: hallet* * to send email, replace * with @ess.washington.edu

Areas of Interest:
Glacial and Periglacial Geomorphology

Research Groups:
Geomorphology
Glaciology
Quaternary Research

Other UW Academic Affiliations:
Director, UW Quaternary Research Center

Background and Current Research:
After receiving his Ph.D. in geology at UCLA in 1975, Bernard Hallet joined the Earth Sciences faculty at Stanford University. In 1981, he became a faculty member of the Department of Geological Sciences and the Quaternary Research Center at the University of Washington.

Hallet is fascinated by the processes that shape alpine and arctic landscapes. The strategy he prefers in his studies of diverse processes is a combination of sound theoretical analysis of the governing physics/chemistry with detailed field or laboratory work.

Much of his past and current work is directed at glacial erosion of bedrock, chemical processes active at the glacier bed, till deformation, and a more precise interpretation of the geological record of past ice sheets. More recently he has become interested in developing a sound physical basis for considering some of the textural and distributional properties of till and other glacial sediments.

Another major area of interest of Bernard Hallet is periglacial geomorphology. Over the last decade he and his students have studied the dynamics of patterned ground in western Spitsbergen. Through detailed field studies, including extensive instrumentation to document year-round activity (temperature, soil displacements, moisture, pore pressure, soil pressure, etc.), they are studying the dynamics of sorted circles. They have learned a lot about the thermal regime, heave/thaw characteristics and other dynamical aspects of very active sorted circles, including long-term circulatory motion of the soil. Another subject of considerable interest is frost weathering, more specifically the precise mechanism by which freezing leads to the propagation of fractures in rocks. This work has been largely theoretical in nature, but it has recently received considerable experimental support from studies of acoustic emissions emitted by crack propagation events due to sustained ice growth. Hallet has also recently joined Greg Dash, of the University of Washington condensed matter physics group, in a collaborative effort to elucidate the fundamental nature of water in porous media at subfreezing temperatures, which underlies a diversity of periglacial phenomena.

Selected Publications:
Hallet, B., 1976, Deposits formed by subglacial precipitation of CaCO3. Geological Society of America Bulletin, v. 87(7), p. 1003-1015.

Hallet, B., 1979, A theoretical model of glacial abrasion, Journal of Glaciology, v. 23(89), p. 29-50.

Walder, J. S., and Hallet, B., 1985, A theoretical model of the fracture of rock due to freezing, Geological Society of America Bulletin, v. 96(3), p. 336-346.

Hallet, B., Anderson, S., Stubbs, C. W., and Gregory, E. C., 1988, Surface soil displacements in sorted circles, western Spitsbergen. Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Permafrost, Trondheim, Norway, August 1, 1988, v. 1, p. 770-775.

Harbor, J. M., Hallet, B. and Raymond, C. F., 1988, A numerical model of landform development by glacial erosion, Nature, v. 333 (6171), p. 347-349.

Hallet, B., Walder, J. S., and Stubbs, C. W, 1991, Weathering by segregation ice growth in microcracks at sustained sub-zero temperatures: verification from an experimental study using acoustic emissions, Permafrost and Periglacial Processes, v. 2, p. 283-300.

Werner, B. T. and Hallet, B., 1993, Sorted stripes: a numerical study of textural self-organization, Nature, v. 361, p. 142-145.

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