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Encyclopedia of Marine Geosciences pp 1–7Cite as

Ice-Rafted Debris (IRD)

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...

Keywords

  • Ocean Heat Transport
  • Planktic Foraminifera
  • Rafting Process
  • Iceberg Calve
  • Greenland Fjord

These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

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Fig. 1

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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 (IOW), 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. Institute of Marine and Coastal Sciences, University of Szczecin, Szczecin, Poland

    Jan Harff

  2. Institute of Geography and Geology, University of Greifswald, Greifswald, Germany

    Martin Meschede

  3. Leibiniz Institute of Marine Sciences, University of Kiel, Kiel, Germany

    Sven Petersen

  4. Academy of Sciences, Humanities, and Lit c/o Helmholtz-Center for Ocean Research, Kiel, Germany

    Jörn Thiede

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Kuijpers, A., Knutz, P., Moros, M. (2014). Ice-Rafted Debris (IRD). In: Harff, J., Meschede, M., Petersen, S., Thiede, J. (eds) Encyclopedia of Marine Geosciences. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-6644-0_182-1

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