Baffin Bay/Nares Strait surface (seafloor) sediment mineralogy: further investigations and methods to elucidate spatial variations in provenance

• Main Author: Andrews, John T.
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: unknown
• Published: NRC Research Press (a division of Canadian Science Publishing) 2019
• Subjects: Baffin Bay; Baffin Island; Greenland; Nares; Baffin; Ice Sheet; Nares strait
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/1807/95995; http://www.nrcresearchpress.com/doi/abs/10.1139/cjes-2018-0207

The goal of the paper is to ascertain whether there are significant regional variations in sediment mineral composition that might be used to elucidate ice sheet histories. The weight % of non-clay and clay minerals were determined by quantitative X-ray diffraction. Cluster analysis, an unsupervised learning approach, is used to group sediment mineralogy of 263 seafloor/core top samples between ~80° and 62°N. The optimum number of clusters, based on 30 indexes, was 3 regardless of data transformations. Maps of the distribution of the 3 mineral clusters or facies indicate a significant difference in weight %s between samples from the West Greenland and Baffin Island shelves. However, several indexes support a larger number of clusters and similar analyses of the spatial distribution and defining minerals of 9 mineral facies indicated a strong association with the original 3 clusters and with broad geographic designations (i.e. West Greenland shelf, Baffin Island fiords etc). Classification Decision Tree analysis indicates that this difference is primarily controlled by the percentages of plagioclase feldspars versus alkali feldspars. The accepted manuscript in pdf format is listed with the files at the bottom of this page. The presentation of the authors' names and (or) special characters in the title of the manuscript may differ slightly between what is listed on this page and what is listed in the pdf file of the accepted manuscript; that in the pdf file of the accepted manuscript is what was submitted by the author.