Total sediment thickness grid of the Southern Pacific Ocean off West Antarctica, links to NetCDF files

Paleotopographic models of the West Antarctic margin, which are essential for robust simulations of paleoclimate scenarios, lack information on sediment thickness and geodynamic conditions, resulting in large uncertainties. A new total sediment thickness grid spanning the Ross Sea-Amundsen Sea-Belli...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Wobbe, Florian, Lindeque, Ansa, Gohl, Karsten
Format: Dataset
Language:English
Published: PANGAEA 2014
Subjects:
AWI_GeoPhy
File format
File name
File size
Marine Geophysics @ AWI
Southern_Pacific_Ocean_off_West_Antarctica
South Pacific Ocean
Title
Uniform resource locator/link to file
Antarctic
Ross Sea
West Antarctica
Amundsen Sea
Bellingshausen Sea
Pacific
Byrd
Marie Byrd Land
Antarc*
Antarctica
Online Access:https://doi.pangaea.de/10.1594/PANGAEA.835589
https://doi.org/10.1594/PANGAEA.835589
Description
Summary:Paleotopographic models of the West Antarctic margin, which are essential for robust simulations of paleoclimate scenarios, lack information on sediment thickness and geodynamic conditions, resulting in large uncertainties. A new total sediment thickness grid spanning the Ross Sea-Amundsen Sea-Bellingshausen Sea basins is presented and is based on all the available seismic reflection, borehole, and gravity modeling data offshore West Antarctica. This grid was combined with NGDC's global 5 arc minute grid of ocean sediment thickness (Whittaker et al., 2013, doi:10.1002/ggge.20181) and extends the NGDC grid further to the south. Sediment thickness along the West Antarctic margin tends to be 3-4 km larger than previously assumed. The sediment volume in the Bellingshausen, Amundsen, and Ross Sea basins amounts to 3.61, 3.58, and 2.78 million km³, respectively. The residual basement topography of the South Pacific has been revised and the new data show an asymmetric trend over the Pacific-Antarctic Ridge. Values are anomalously high south of the spreading ridge and in the Ross Sea area, where the topography seems to be affected by persistent mantle processes. In contrast, the basement topography offshore Marie Byrd Land cannot be attributed to dynamic topography, but rather to crustal thickening due to intraplate volcanism. Present-day dynamic topography models disagree with the presented revised basement topography of the South Pacific, rendering paleotopographic reconstructions with such a limited dataset still fairly uncertain.

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