The Greenland Ice Sheet (GrIS) responds rapidly to the present climate; therefore, its response to the predicted future warming is of concern. To learn more about the impact of future climatic warming on the ice sheet, decoding its behavior during past periods of warmer than present climate is important. However, due to the scarcity of marine studies reconstructing ice sheet conditions on the Northeast ...

Permafrost and glaciers in the high Arctic form an impermeable ‘cryospheric cap’ that traps a large reservoir of subsurface methane, preventing it from reaching the atmosphere. Cryospheric vulnerability to climate warming is making releases of this methane possible. On Svalbard, where air temperatures are rising more than two times faster than the average for the Arctic, glaciers are retreating and ...

The Palaeocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM) was a global warming event of 5–6 °C around 56 million years ago caused by input of carbon into the ocean and atmosphere. Hydrothermal venting of greenhouse gases produced in contact aureoles surrounding magmatic intrusions in the North Atlantic Igneous Province have been proposed to play a key role in the PETM carbon-cycle perturbation, but the precise ...

Several Archean granitoid-greenstone terranes are exposed on the southeastern Kaapvaal craton in South Africa, but they received little scientific attention compared to the archetypal greenstone belt successions of the Barberton Mountain Land at the eastern craton margin. This study reports on a detailed field and geochemical survey of the Buffalo River Greenstone Belt at the southern Kaapvaal craton ...

The Dom Feliciano Belt of southern Brazil and Uruguay represents part of a larger Neoproterozoic orogenic system formed during the amalgamation of Western Gondwana. The hinterland and foreland domains in parts of the belt preserve deformation structures and metamorphic assemblages that developed during early crustal thickening from c. 650 Ma. However, the metamorphic history of the southern foreland, ...

Gas seeps and fluid-flow related seabed features are found over the entire Norwegian exclusive economic zone (EEZ). Multibeam water-column data from c. 136 000 km2 has revealed more than 5 000 gas seeps. Most of the gas seeps seem to have biogenic, thermogenic or mixed origin; some may be of abiotic origin. The spatial distribution of the gas seeps appears to correlate with: 1 – structural highs ...

Past intensity of methane release from deep-ocean methane hydrates continues to be challenging to reconstruct reliably. Here, we used fossil ostracode fauna paired with foraminiferal δ¹³C values in a marine sediment core from Vestnesa Ridge, western Svalbard margin, to reconstruct methane seepage activity during the late Quaternary and to examine faunal response to deglacial climatic ...

A fossil-rich interval in the organic-rich marine black mudstone of the Middle Triassic Botneheia Formation on eastern Svalbard was logged in high-resolution on an extremely well exposed section with emphasis on bivalve beds, taphonomic features, trace fossils and oxygenation proxies. The size distribution, fragmentation, articulation and orientation of three bivalve beds of the epifaunal flat ...

Antarctica’s continental margins pose an unknown submarine landslide-generated tsunami risk to Southern Hemisphere populations and infrastructure. Understanding the factors driving slope failure is essential to assessing future geohazards. Here, we present a multidisciplinary study of a major submarine landslide complex along the eastern Ross Sea continental slope (Antarctica) that identifies ...

Flood-generated hyperpycnal flows are dense, sediment-laden, turbulent flows that can form long-lived, bottom-hugging turbidity currents, which undoubtedly transport large volumes of fine-grained sediments into the ocean. However, their ability in transferring sand into deep-water basins is debated. This study presents sedimentological evidence of sandy hyperpycnal flow deposits (hyperpycnites) in ...