Stunning images reveal glacial landscapes under the oceans
New atlas offers a window into Earth’s glacial past
DIGGING IN Wide troughs found under 250 meters of water in the Barents Sea, north of Norway and Russia, were shoveled out by the broad bases of icebergs broken from ice shelves, confirming the existence of those shelves. Darker shades indicate greater depth.
Atlas of Submarine Glacial Landforms
The footprints of long-gone glaciers and icebergs are now frozen in time in a stunning new collection of images of Earth’s seafloor.
The Atlas of Submarine Glacial Landforms is a comprehensive, high-resolution atlas of underwater landscapes that have been shaped by glaciers, largely in polar and subpolar regions, and provides a comparative look at how glaciers, ice and related climate shifts transform Earth. Kelly Hogan, a marine geophysicist with the British Antarctic Survey and an editor of the atlas, presented it April 26 in Vienna at a meeting of the European Geosciences Union.
Most of the more than 200 images were generated from research vessels using multibeam bathymetry, which renders the seafloor surface in 3-D, exposing a region’s glacial history. For example, the distinctive asymmetry of 20,000-year-old glacial deposits
