Featured Science Paper
A new bathymetric compilation for the South Orkney Islands, Antarctic Peninsula (49°-39W° to 64°-59°S): Insights into the glacial development of the continental shelf
Rapid warming in the Antarctic Peninsula region over the past 50 years has had well-publicised environmental impacts, including ice-shelf collapse, glacier-mass loss and sea-level rise. To understand the impacts of this ongoing climate change, it is necessary to set the modern changes in a historical context. A key element of this is to reconstruct the size and extent of past ice sheets that once extended great distances (during former glacial periods) over the continental shelves of Antarctica. In particular, the South Orkney Islands have been identified as a region where our understanding of the glacial history is limited.
To this end, we present a new, high resolution bathymetric compilation of the South Orkney Islands and surrounding continental shelf, located north-east of the Antarctic Peninsula. The new bathymetric grid offers an unrivalled ‘image’ of the sea floor and forms important baseline information for a range of scientific applications and end users (eg. Oceanographers, glacial modellers etc.).
The continental shelf is dominated by seven large glacial troughs that mark the pathways of former outlet glaciers, formed during periods of more extensive ice cover (ie. last ice age). A large, cross-shelf sedimentary depocentre has been interpreted as the terminal limit of recent glaciations (multiple glacial-interglacial cycles) and suggests that, during maximum glaciations, grounded ice extended to the 300-350m contour with an ice cap coverage of around 19,000km2. The new bathymetric grid thus provides the most extensive and accurate estimates of ice extent across the entire shelf to date.
Link to the full paper in the NERC Open Research Archive
Authors
Dickens, W. A., A. G. C. Graham, J. A. Smith, J. A. Dowdeswell, R. D. Larter, C. -D. Hillenbrand, P. N. Trathan, J. E. Arndt, and G. Kuhn (2014)
Publication
Geochem. Geophys. Geosyst., 15, 2494–2514, doi:10.1002/2014GC005323
