Implications Of Fault Damaged Bedrock To Tectonic and Landscape Evolution In Coastal Alaska

Abstract:

Bedrock material strength properties heavily impact erosion rates in temperate glacial environments. We focus on the influence of localized tectonic crustal weakening in southeast Alaska on modern glacial erosion rates, thereby quantifying a primary feedback in tectonic/climatic coupling. Southeast Alaska, with its coincident high strain rates, vigorous glacial erosion and rapid sedimentation rates, provides an excellent setting in which to evaluate this interaction.

To characterize the relationship between fault damage and glacial incision, we collected data in transects across the strike-slip Fairweather Fault in Yakutat and Disenchantment Bays, in deglaciated valleys below the Mendenhall, Herbert, Ptarmigan, and Lemon Creek Glaciers on the perimeter of the Juneau Icefield, and on deglaciated nunataks on the Echo and Vaughan Lewis Glaciers in the interior of the Juneau Icefield. The mechanical properties of the bedrock are characterized by estimates of fault spacing and material cohesion. In structurally-controlled bedrock valleys exploited by glaciers, fracture spacing may vary by several orders of magnitude across fault damage zones, from more than 10 m to less than 0.1 m. Analysis of active and quiescent fault zones indicate that this variation approximates a power law relationship and correlates with a gradient in cohesive strength varying from greater than 50 MPa to less than 50 kPa between intact bedrock and the core of fault damage zones. The width and orientation of the damage zones is highly variable and we have chosen our field sites to sample zones of very large total displacement, up to kilometers along the Fairweather Fault, and substantially smaller displacements, down to centimeters for the Juneau Icefield locales.

Using a Cordilleran Ice sheet model to extend our modern observations into last glacial maximum conditions, we predict both erosion rates and sediment provenance for a material strength pattern influenced by tectonically induced fault damage. Compared to an earth model of homogeneous strength properties, our fault damage model predicts high spatial heterogeneity of erosion rates and sediment yield that changes as Cordilleran ice sheet thickness decreases from last glacial maximum to modern conditions.