Deglacial floods in the Beaufort Sea

Abstract:

During summer 2013 USCGC Healy cruise 1302 surveyed and cored between Barrow, AK and the mouth of Amundsen Gulf, far to the east in the Beaufort Sea. Holocene deposition rates on the continental slope are high in the eastern Chukchi Sea and are lower farther east where deglacial sediments dominate. This is evident in CHIRP seismic data that trace two groups of reflectors as the sub-bottom depth between them increases. On the slope, at ~700 m w.d. near the mouth of the Mackenzie River, a pair of piston cores make a composite sequence 17 m long. The lower 4 m are sandy and capped by a maximum in magnetic susceptibility (ms) and a prominent reflector. N. pachyderma is too rare in this interval for 14C dates, but the d18-O of this species is as low as late Holocene. Above the reflector, counts of IRD are low, d18-O continues low, and the sediment is an acoustically transparent 7 m thick unit. The deepest date is 12.8 conv. 14C kyr at 13 m, and 3 overlying dates indicate the transparent unit accumulated at 8 m/14C kyr. The top of this unit is marked by the upper reflector that is in detail a triplet that corresponds to triple peaks in ms, grainsize, and IRD abundance. Between the two oldest sub-peaks of this reflector, d18-O reaches minimum values of ~1‰, or about 0.5‰ lower than late Holocene. In contrast to the deeper interval, this event is only 0.5 m thick and is dated to 11,050 conv. 14C kyr. Following this event, d18-O increases abruptly and then gradually decreases within the Holocene, more like a typical isotope stratigraphy. Overall, 9 dates indicate a gradual down-core increase in sedimentation rates from 9 cm/kyr in the late Holocene to the extreme of the deeper transparent unit with no age reversals. Using the modern Beaufort Sea Delta R (DR; 436 yrs), our oldest date calibrates to 13.8 ka, a little too old to be the cause of the Younger Dryas. However, the combined seismic, isotope, and sedimentological data suggest that at least the older transparent unit is consistent with a flood deposit associated with the YD, and a DR of ~1100 yrs would bring the two into line. Here we will explore these data as well as underway studies including XRF and apparent ventilation ages of slope waters that may give some insight into DR.