Abstract
The Weddell Sea basin is of particular significance for understanding climate processes, including the generation of ocean water masses and their influence on ocean circulation as well as the dynamics of the Antarctic ice sheets. The sedimentary record, preserved below the basin floor, serves as an archive of the pre-glacial to glacial development of these processes, which were accompanied by tectonic processes in its early glacial phase. Three multichannel seismic reflection transects, in total nearly 5,000 km long, are used to interpret horizons and define a seismostratigraphic model for the basin. We expand this initial stratigraphy model to the greater Weddell Sea region through a network of more than 50 additional seismic lines. Information from few boreholes are used to constrain sediment ages in this stratigraphy, supported by magnetic anomalies indicating decreasing oceanic basement ages from southeast to northwest. Using these constraints, we calculate grids to depict the depths, thicknesses and sedimentation rates of pre-glacial (145–34 Ma), transitional (34–15 Ma) and full-glacial (15 Ma to present) units. Sedimentation thicknesses and sedimentation rates were calculated at the 12 selected points in the entire basin to give a brief overview of the deposition history, which will contribute to the understanding of the Antarctic ice sheet development and dynamics from the greenhouse to icehouse world in the Cenozoic.
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Acknowledgments
The authors would like to thank the masters, crews and seismic teams of the ship expeditions to the Weddell Sea enabling the acquisition of the used data. The British Antarctic Survey (BAS), the German Federal Institute of Geosciences and Resources (BGR) as well as research institutes in Norway and Spain are gratefully acknowledged for their contribution of the used seismic data to the Antarctic Seismic Data Library System (SDLS). X.H. has been receiving a PhD scholarship from the Chinese Scholarship Council. This study has primarily been supported through institutional funds of the Alfred Wegener Institute through Work Package 3.2 of its research program PACES.
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Huang, X., Gohl, K. (2015). Seismostratigraphic Analysis and Glacial History of the Weddell Sea Region, Antarctica. In: Lohmann, G., Meggers, H., Unnithan, V., Wolf-Gladrow, D., Notholt, J., Bracher, A. (eds) Towards an Interdisciplinary Approach in Earth System Science. Springer Earth System Sciences. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-13865-7_22
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-13865-7_22
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