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Ice-rafted Debris (IRD)

  • Reference work entry
  • First Online:
Encyclopedia of Marine Geosciences

Part of the book series: Encyclopedia of Earth Sciences Series ((EESS))

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Definition

Ice-rafted debris (IRD) is a terrigenous material transported within a matrix of ice and deposited in marine or lake sediments when the ice matrix melts (US National Climatic Data Center).

History of observations

Coarse-grained clasts interpreted as ice-rafted debris were first recognized in seabed samples collected during a 1928 expedition of the US Coast Guard vessel “Marion” in the northern Labrador Sea and Baffin Bay (Ricketts and Trask, 1932). A decade later, Bramlette and Bradley (1940) described glacially transported striated clasts and erratics from North Atlantic seabed sediments. The more common use of IRD as a proxy of glacial variability commenced with the systematic sampling of deep-sea sediments in the early 1970s, notably by the international Deep Sea Drilling Programme (DSDP) and the “Vema” cruises operated from Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in the USA. Initially, IRD analyses were mainly applied to understand the long-term Cenozoic evolution of ice...

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland (GEUS), Øster Voldgade 10, 1350 Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark

    Antoon Kuijpers & Paul Knutz

  2. Leibniz Institute for Baltic Sea Research Warnemünde, Seestrasse 15, 18119, Rostock, Germany

    Matthias Moros

Authors
  1. Antoon Kuijpers
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  2. Paul Knutz
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  3. Matthias Moros
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Antoon Kuijpers .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Szczecin, Szczecin, Poland

    Jan Harff

  2. University of Greifswald, Greifswald, Germany

    Martin Meschede

  3. GEOMAR Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research, Kiel, Germany

    Sven Petersen

  4. Institute of Earth Science, KÖPPEN-Laboratory, Saint Petersburg State University, St. Petersburg, Russia

    JÖrn Thiede

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Kuijpers, A., Knutz, P., Moros, M. (2016). Ice-rafted Debris (IRD). In: Harff, J., Meschede, M., Petersen, S., Thiede, J. (eds) Encyclopedia of Marine Geosciences. Encyclopedia of Earth Sciences Series. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-6238-1_182

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