Abstract Groundwater storage in alpine regions is essential for maintaining baseflows in mountain streams. Recent studies have shown that common alpine landforms (e.g., talus and moraine) have substantial groundwater storage capacity, but the hydrogeological connectivity between individual landforms has not been understood. This study characterizes the hydrogeology of an alpine cirque basin in the Canadian Rocky Mountains that contains typical alpine landforms (talus, meadow, moraines) and hydrological features (tarn, streams, and springs). Geological, hydrological, and hydrochemical observations were used to understand the overall hydrogeological setting of the study basin, and three different geophysical methods (electrical resistivity tomography, seismic refraction tomography, and ground penetrating radar) were used to characterize the subsurface structure and connectivity, and to develop a hydrogeological conceptual model. Geophysical imaging shows that the talus is typically 20–40 m thick and highly heterogeneous. The meadow sediments are only up to 11 m thick but are part of a 30–40-m-thick accumulation of unconsolidated material that fills a bedrock overdeepening (i.e. a closed, subglacial basin). A minor, shallow groundwater system feeds springs on the talus and streams on the meadow, whereas a deep system in the moraine supplies most of the water to the basin outlet springs, thereby serving as a ‘gate keeper’ of the basin. Although the hydrologic functions of the talus in this study are substantially different from other locations, primarily due to differences in bedrock lithology and geomorphic processes, the general conceptual framework developed in this study is expected to be applicable to other alpine regions.

Pleistocene-aged glacial sediments are found in many parts the Northern Hemisphere and are often composed of clay-rich tills which form aquitards that can control drainage and influence groundwater movement and contaminant transport. Site-scale investigations have characterized the hydraulic properties of till aquitards; however, the hydraulic conductivity of these units has not been quantitatively described at a regional scale of tens of kilometers. This study constrains regionally representative hydraulic conductivity estimates and characterizes the hydrogeological properties of Pleistocene-aged till aquitards from data collected at 15 sites compiled from 21 studies. The data quantify the scale dependence of hydraulic conductivity measurements in till aquitards and further define the relationship between hydraulic conductivity and depth. Data from centimeter-scale laboratory tests remained generally constant with depth, with a geometric mean hydraulic conductivity of 7.0 × 10−11 m/s and a standard deviation of 0.4 orders of magnitude, while the meter-scale in-situ tests had a geometric mean of 4.9 × 10−9 m/s and a standard deviation of 1.0 orders of magnitude at depths less than 10 m, and 3.7 × 10−11 m/s and 0.2 order of magnitude at depths greater than 23 m. The results support the existence of a shallow fractured zone of higher hydraulic conductivity and a deeper zone characterized by matrix permeability. The observed data variability occurred primarily at the site scale, while the central tendency and variability of the data were consistent between sites separated by hundreds of kilometers suggesting that statistically derived, depth-defined regional hydraulic conductivity estimates can be meaningful.