Age stratigraphy in the East Antarctic Ice Sheet inferred from radio-echo sounding horizons

The East Antarctic Ice Sheet contains a wealth of information that can be extracted from its internal architecture such as distribution of age, past flow features, and surface and basal properties. Airborne radar surveys can sample this stratigraphic archive across broad areas. Here, we identify and...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Earth System Science Data
Main Authors: Winter, Anna, Steinhage, Daniel, Creyts, Timothy T., Kleiner, Thomas, Eisen, Olaf
Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
Language:English
Published: Copernicus Publications 2019
Subjects:
Online Access:https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-11-1069-2019
https://noa.gwlb.de/receive/cop_mods_00000834
https://noa.gwlb.de/servlets/MCRFileNodeServlet/cop_derivate_00000796/essd-11-1069-2019.pdf
https://essd.copernicus.org/articles/11/1069/2019/essd-11-1069-2019.pdf
Description
Summary:The East Antarctic Ice Sheet contains a wealth of information that can be extracted from its internal architecture such as distribution of age, past flow features, and surface and basal properties. Airborne radar surveys can sample this stratigraphic archive across broad areas. Here, we identify and trace key horizons across several radar surveys to obtain the stratigraphic information. We transfer the age–depth scales from ice cores to intersecting radar data. We then propagate these age scales across the ice sheet using the high fidelity continuity of the radar horizons. In Dronning Maud Land, including Dome Fuji, we mapped isochrones with ages of 38 and 74 ka. In the central region of East Antarctica around Dome Concordia, Vostok and Dome Argus, we use isochrone ages of 38, 48, 90 and 161 ka. Taking together both regions, we provide isochrone depths traced along a combined profile length of more than 40 000 km and discuss uncertainties of the obtained stratigraphy, as well as factors important to consider for further expansion. This data set is the most extensive distribution of internal horizons in East Antarctica to date. The isochrone depths presented in this study are available on PANGAEA (https://doi.org/10.1594/PANGAEA.895528; Winter et al., 2018).