Deep circulation of groundwater in overpressured subglacial aquifers and its geological consequences

Abstract

It is generally assumed that meltwater from the base of ice sheets is discharged in a relatively thin subglacial zone. Whereas this may be true for ice sheets resting on impermeable beds, many ice sheets, such as the glacial period ice sheets of North America and Europe, flowed over extensive aquifers. A theory is developed which suggests that high rates of meltwater discharge into these aquifers would have completely reorganised their flow fields, producing intergrated patterns of glacially pressurised flow controlled by the continental-scale form of the ice sheet surface rather than the small-scale topographic basins which determine modern aquifer extent. The theory is applied to the aquifers which underlay the Saalian ice sheet in The Netherlands, where it is shown that potential gradients and groundwater flow velocities would have developed which were two orders of magnitude greater than modern values and that the dominant flow vectors would have been normal to those of the modern flow. Thus, glacial/interglacial cycling in areas which have suffered periodic glaciation during the late Cenozoic may have experienced alternating phases of greater and lesser flow energy. It represents another example of climatically-driven cyclical change in the earth. Under highly energised glacial conditions, potential gradients much larger than modern values may have produced many common features of sediment disruption, such as diapirs, liquifaction structures and pipes, and forms such as glacial ‘doughnuts’ and pock marks, which have hitherto been explained by other processes. Deep and penetrative flushing of aquifers by glacial meltwater may have left a distinctive geochemical signal in them which may be used to test the theory. Gases such as methane, generated at shallow depth, may have been trapped beneath the glacial ‘cap-rock’, and may also have played an important role in these processes.