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 called drumlins in the Gulf of Bothnia, between Finland and Sweden, suggests that ice flowed south, toward a larger glacier in the Baltic Sea.
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