Project Details
Projekt
Glacial dynamics of the Laurentide Ice Sheet along a terrestrial-to-marine transect in East Canada (labsCAUs)
Applicant
Dr. Felix Gross
Subject Area
Palaeontology
Geophysics
Geophysics
Term
since 2020
Project identifier
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 447580143
Freshwater pulses during deglaciation events are hypothesized to have a major impact on the global geostrophic circulation, as deep-water formation and current circulations can be interfered and disrupted by sudden temperature and salinity drops, resulting in global climate changes. The eastern Canadian Shield and the continental margin offshore Labrador are key areas for paleoclimatic and paleoceanographic investigations. Major past and recent ice sheets affected the entire area and eventually drain(ed) into the area of the Labrador Shelf either directly through the Laurentide Ice Sheet or indirectly through the Hudson Bay/Davis Strait by the Innuitian and Greenland Ice Sheets. So far, information on the dynamics of the Laurentide Ice Sheet is however mainly derived from sediment cores located far offshore in the Labrador Sea and the North Atlantic, i.e. from ice-distal locations. On the Labrador shelf, investigations mostly focused on Holocene sequences, and glacial information is sparse. Inland information is mostly restricted to dating and description of geomorphological features, but records that provide continuous data, or data older than the glacial features that are currently exposed, are missing. Over the past 5 years, we collected several marine seismic, bathymetric and echosounder data across the Labrador Shelf, Lake Melville and Lake Manicouagan. The data show a presence of preserved, partly buried glacial landforms like moraines, eskers, drumlins, mega-scale glacial lineations, and iceberg scours. This proposed study targets the marine endmember at the Labrador Shelf, a brackish transitional zone at Hudson Bay/Strait and the terrestrial endmember at Lake Manicouagan. Seismic along with hydroacoustic data will be investigated to reconstruct the Laurentide Ice Sheet behavior during past (pre-Wisconsinan) glacials and to identify sites that potentially hold a long paleoclimate / paleoceanographic record. The aim of this study is the identification of potential drillsites that contain long, undisturbed sedimentary records with pre-Holocene sediments. This information will form a solid backbone for a future MagellanPlus workshop to establish a drilling community and to initiate a future amphibious IODP/ICDP drilling project.
DFG Programme
Infrastructure Priority Programmes
Co-Investigators
Dr. Andrea Catalina Gebhardt; Professor Dr. Sebastian Krastel
