Landforms characteristic of inter-ice stream settings on the Norwegian and Svalbard continental margins

Abstract

The suite of sedimentary landforms produced on continental shelves by fast-flowing ice streams is typified by features that are elongate and streamlined in the direction of past ice flow (e.g. Stokes & Clark 2001; Ottesen et al. 2005 a ; Livingstone et al. 2012). By contrast, the slower-flowing parts of an ice sheet, located between ice streams and fed by drainage basins that are often an order of magnitude or more smaller than the interior basins feeding the ice stream, have a very different set of characteristic submarine landforms; these are orientated predominantly transverse to the direction of past ice flow (Ottesen & Dowdeswell 2009; Klages et al. 2013, 2016). In addition, on many high-latitude shelf-banks glacial landforms produced beneath and at the margins of ice sheets are often reworked by the ploughing action of iceberg keels, sometimes to the point where these primary depositional landforms are almost obliterated (e.g. Dowdeswell et al. 1993, 2014). Submarine landforms from the western margin of the former Eurasian Ice Sheet, which extended across the shallow banks and deeper intervening troughs on the continental shelves of Norway and Svalbard at the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM) (Svendsen et al. 2004; Ottesen et al. 2005 a ), are used to illustrate this inter-ice stream palaeo-glacial setting (Fig. 1). In these locations, ice flux is limited by relatively small drainage-basin size and ice flow is likely to be slow relative to the 103–104 m a−1 velocities of adjacent ice streams (Dowdeswell & Siegert 1999). Fig. 1. ( a ) Location of study areas offshore of Norway and Svalbard (red boxes; map from IBCAO v. 3.0). Bathymetric data showing the pattern of shallow banks and intervening cross-shelf troughs offshore of ( b ) NW Norway and ( c ) NW Spitsbergen. WI, Wijdefjorden; KR, Krossfjorden. ### Description The …