Submarine landforms produced by drifting icebergs are common on the sedimentary beds of the polar seas. High-resolution multibeam-bathymetric images have revealed a variety of iceberg-related landforms, ranging from 1 to 2 m high corrugation ridges (e.g. Jakobsson et al. 2011; Graham et al. 2013) to large linear to curvilinear ploughmarks several tens of kilometres long and tens of metres deep, that are often distributed chaotically on polar continental shelves (e.g. Dowdeswell et al. 2010). Extensive lateral erosion of submarine ridge-top sediments in the central Arctic Ocean has also been attributed to the impact of deep-drafted icebergs that were once much more abundant in the Arctic than they are today (Jakobsson et al. 2008).
Description
Submarine terraces with remarkably flat surfaces were observed on the crest and along the distal slope of a large terminal-moraine ridge at the mouth of the Hambergbukta (Fig. 1a, c), a fjord in southeastern Spitsbergen (Fig. 1b). The terraces were recorded at several bathymetric levels from 29–66 m in water depth with their surface areas varying from c. 0.04 km2 to >2 km2 (Fig. 1a, d).
(a) Swath-bathymetric imagery …
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Possible iceberg-produced submarine terraces in Hambergbukta, Spitsbergen
