Seismic and morphologic analysis of the Gulf of Alaska Yakutat margin : evidence for recent trough mouth fan growth

The active St. Elias Orogen in southern Alaska was created by collision of the offshore Yakutat Terrane with North America. These mountains exhibit the highest coastal relief in the world and also are home to temperate tidewater glaciers, one of the most powerful erosive agents known. Glaciation in Southern Alaska has occurred since the Miocene, but climatic shifts associated with the intensification of Northern Hemisphere glaciation at ~2.5 Ma and the mid-Pleistocene transition at ~1 Ma have led to drastic increases in glacial erosion and associated offshore sediment transport and deposition. The Yakutat continental shelf has hosted ice streams during glacial advances since the mid-Pleistocene, but it is only recently that ice has reached the continental shelf edge itself. Quantitative morphologic analysis finds significant variability along the slope, with an relatively gentle gradient trough mouth fan building off the Yakutat Sea Valley, a shelf-crossing glacial trough, due to massive sediment supply from the heart of the St. Elias Orogen, while farther to the east the extremely steep continental margin is heavily gullied and sediment bypasses the slope reaching the offshore Surveyor fan. Seismic stratigraphy indicates that ice streams first reached the shelf edge with the mid-Pleistocene climate transition, a shift from 41 ka to 100 ka glacial-interglacial climate cycles. This increase in glacial durations allowed not only the ice to sustain advances to the shelf edge, but led to amplified erosion and climate-tectonic feedback effects.