In areas where bedrock outcrops are situated between converging glaciers, longitudinal debris accumulations mark the boundary between adjacent ice-flow units. These medial moraines often give the glacier surface a striped appearance. The seafloor offshore from Scott Inlet, Arctic Canada, exhibits well-preserved medial moraines and other elongate features. These elongate submarine landforms allow the reconstruction of the flow direction of the Laurentide Ice Sheet during the Late Glacial Maximum c. 24–23 14C ka BP (Dyke et al. 2002).
Description
Scott Inlet is an area where two fjords, trending roughly normal to the coastline of northern Baffin Island, join to form a larger embayment (Fig. 1). An elongate central island, Scott Island, marks the branching of these two coalescing fjords (Fig. 1a). A cross-shelf trough approximately 75 km in length is present on the continental shelf seaward of Scott Island (Batchelor & Dowdeswell 2014). A large curvilinear ridge extends 35 km offshore of Remote Peninsula on the southern margin of Scott Inlet, along with numerous shorter elongate sediment ridges in the lee of bedrock highs (Fig. 1a, e). The longitudinal profile of the large ridge shows a relatively smooth descent to c. 735 m water depth (Fig. 1h, profile a–a′), with minor undulations and a shallowing trend further seaward to the limit of the multibeam data.
(a) Multibeam data from Scott Inlet, Baffin Island. MM, medial moraine; CT, crag-and-tail; SS, smooth seafloor; smm, subsidiary medial moraine; sbm, …
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