Good neighbours shaped by vigorous currents: Cold-water coral mounds and contourites in the North Atlantic

Abstract

Over the recent years, two research fields addressing continental slope sedimentary systems have gained significant momentum: contourites and cold-water coral mounds. Being both related to intense bottom currents and being both dependent on sediment supply, they share some commonalities resulting in their widespread co-occurrence. However, as cold-water coral mounds predominantly occur in shallow to intermediate water depths, this co-occurrence is restricted to these depth levels. For both systems, the available knowledge is derived basically from North Atlantic Ocean settings, indicating the potential to discover such systems hidden in the other ocean basins (as well as still hidden in the Atlantic). Contourites and cold-water coral mounds have the capability of providing high-resolution palaeo-environmental records, although with often differing temporal ranges and/or temporal resolutions. Applying the concept of a joint exploitation of sedimentary records obtained from mounds and contourites offers the unique possibility of analysing contourite and mound development as well as the related palaeo-environmental settings much more comprehensively than done when only considering one of these archives. Thus, after two decades of intense research, providing significant knowledge about contourites and cold-water coral mounds from the North Atlantic, new ideas and concepts may arise from a close collaboration of scientists working in these two fields.