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Formation of plateau landscapes on glaciated continental margins

Nature Geoscience volume 10, pages 592–597 (2017)Cite this article

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Abstract

Low-relief plateaus separated by deeply incised fjords are hallmarks of glaciated, passive continental margins. Spectacular examples fringe the once ice-covered North Atlantic coasts of Greenland, Norway and Canada, but low-relief plateau landscapes also underlie present-day ice sheets in Antarctica and Greenland. Dissected plateaus have long been viewed as the outcome of selective linear erosion by ice sheets that focus incision in glacial troughs, leaving the intervening landscapes essentially unaffected. According to this hypothesis, the plateaus are remnants of preglacial low-relief topography. However, here we use computational experiments to show that, like fjords, plateaus are emergent properties of long-term ice-sheet erosion. Ice sheets can either increase or decrease subglacial relief depending on the wavelength of the underlying topography, and plateau topography arises dynamically from evolving feedbacks between topography, ice dynamics and erosion over million-year timescales. This new mechanistic explanation for plateau formation opens the possibility of plateaus contributing significantly to accelerated sediment flux at the onset of the late Cenozoic glaciations, before becoming stable later in the Quaternary.

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Figure 1: Examples of high-elevation plateau landscapes in the North Atlantic region.
Figure 2: Modelled evolution of a continental margin landscape undergoing ice-sheet erosion and flexural isostasy.
Figure 3: Evolution of local topographic relief in response to ice-sheet erosion.
Figure 4: Erosion history and cosmogenic nuclide apparent exposure ages.

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Acknowledgements

The authors acknowledge funding from the Danish Council for Independent Research (grant DFF-6108-00226) and Aarhus University Research Foundation. J.D.J. was supported by the Australian Research Council (DP130104023) and a Marie Słodowsk-Curie Fellowship. V.K.P. acknowledges financial support from the Research Council of Norway. M.F.K. and N.K.L. were supported by the Villum Foundation. We thank A. Margreth and R. S. Anderson for constructive comments and suggestions.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Geoscience, Aarhus University, 8000, Aarhus, Denmark

    David L. Egholm, John D. Jansen, Christian F. Brædstrup, Jane L. Andersen, Sofie V. Ugelvig, Nicolaj K. Larsen & Mads F. Knudsen

  2. Institute of Earth and Environmental Science, University of Potsdam, 14476, Potsdam-Golm, Germany

    John D. Jansen

  3. Department of Earth Sciences, University of Bergen and Bjerknes Centre for Climate Research, 5020, Bergen, Norway

    Vivi K. Pedersen

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Contributions

D.L.E. designed the study and developed the computational modelling scheme. D.L.E. and C.F.B. performed the computational experiments. D.L.E., J.D.J. and C.F.B. interpreted results. D.L.E., J.D.J., C.F.B. and V.K.P. wrote the paper with contributions from co-authors.

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Correspondence to David L. Egholm.

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Egholm, D., Jansen, J., Brædstrup, C. et al. Formation of plateau landscapes on glaciated continental margins. Nature Geosci 10, 592–597 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1038/ngeo2980

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