Pre-glacial and glacial shelf sequences of Amundsen Sea, West Antarctica, from seismic and seabed drill records

• Main Authors: Gohl, Karsten, Uenzelmann-Neben, Gabriele, Larter, Robert D., Klages, Johann Philipp, Hillenbrand, Claus-Dieter, Bickert, Thorsten, Bohaty, Steve, Salzmann, Ulrich, Frederichs, Thomas, Gebhardt, Catalina, Hochmuth, Katharina
• Format: Conference Object
• Language: unknown
• Published: 2018
• Subjects: Amundsen Sea; Antarc*; Antarctic; Antarctica; Ice Sheet; Ross Sea; West Antarctica
• Online Access: https://epic.awi.de/id/eprint/46026/; https://hdl.handle.net/10013/epic.52047

The sedimentary sequences of the Amundsen Sea Embayment (ASE) shelf contain records that have the potential to reveal the environmental and ice sheet evolution from pre-glacial to glacial times for a very dynamic sector of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS). The currently observed massive loss of continental ice in this region may be a precursor to a partial or full collapse of the WAIS. Deciphering paleoclimate and paleo-ice sheet records from the shelf sediments is therefore a major scientific objective for studying processes of past warm times that can be considered as analogues to the present and future WAIS behavior. In previous work, the seismic stratigraphic model of the shelf was based solely on long-distance jump correlation with seismic records from the Ross Sea shelf. New MeBo70 seabed drill cores collected in early 2017 from the ASE shelf contain unconsolidated to highly consolidated sediments spanning time periods from the Holocene to Cretaceous. We are now able to correlate the mapped seismic horizons and units with the physical property and age information from the drill cores to obtain new insight into the sedimentary and paleoenvironmental development of the entire shelf. The drill records and seismo-stratigraphic units of the ASE provide new constraints on the timing of the transition from the pre-glacial terrestrial environment of the Cretaceous–Paleocene to marine transgression thereafter, and the first advances of grounded ice across the shelf.