Abstract
RELIEF features occur on the floor of Lake Superior in distinct zones which are related to bottom type and water depth1 (Fig. 1). Zone A occurs in sand and gravel deposits to about 54 m depth. Deeper, the generalized sequence of sediments is bedrock, glacial till and sand deposits, red clay, red varved clay, and brown clay2–4. In zone B, a network of intersecting linear grooves of width 5 to 75 m having relief of 2 to 5 m and lengths of greater than 2 km occur in a till and red clay bottom at about 54 to 165 m depth. The grooves were probably formed by scouring by icebergs during an earlier lake stage when the continental ice sheet formed a border of the lake. In zone C, below about 165 m, the bottom consists of lacustrine clays, and a series of narrow, V-shaped valleys occur extensively on echograms1. In this study, the valleys were examined by side-scan sonar, high resolution sub-bottom profiling, echosounding, and bottom sampling (Fig. 1).
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BERKSON, J., CLAY, C. Possible Syneresis Origin of Valleys on the Floor of Lake Superior. Nature 245, 89–91 (1973). https://doi.org/10.1038/245089a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/245089a0
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