Researchers say the massive blocks of ice scarred the local seafloor, the scour marks they created are still visible

Oct 13, 2014 20:57 GMT  ·  By
Study finds massive icebergs once traveled long South Carolina's and Florida's coastlines
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   Study finds massive icebergs once traveled long South Carolina's and Florida's coastlines

In a recent paper in the journal Nature Geoscience, researchers argue that, thousands of years ago, icebergs populated the waters off the coast of present-day South Carolina and Florida.

Some of the blocks of ice that made it all the way to this part of the US during the last ice age were so big that they scarred the local seafloor. What's more, it appears that some of the scour marks they created are still visible.

Documenting the presence of icebergs in US waters

Writing in the journal Nature Geoscience, specialist Alan Condron with the University of Massachusetts Amherst and fellow researchers explain that, as part of their investigation, they resorted to high-resolution images to study the seafloor.

The scientists focused on the coastline spanning from Cape Hatteras in South Carolina to southern Florida and managed to pin down about 400 scour marks that they say were left behind by icebergs navigating these waters some 21,000 years ago.

Researcher Alan Condron and colleagues explain that, while traveling along the local coastline, massive blocks of ice originating from an ice sheet covering North America every once in a while encountered fairly shallow waters.

Whenever this happened, their bottoms collided with the seafloor and plowed through it causing grooves and pits to form. Having studied these scars on the seafloor, the scientists behind this research project estimate that some of the icebergs were as big as the ones currently found in Greenland.

Interestingly enough, evidence at hand indicates that, of the icebergs that reached South Carolina and Florida 21,000 years ago, many continued journeying south and eventually reached the Bahamas in the Caribbean. Simply put, they traveled over 3,100 miles (approximately 5,000 kilometers).

“Our study is the first to show that when the large ice sheet over North America known as the Laurentide ice sheet began to melt, icebergs calved into the sea around Hudson Bay and would have periodically drifted along the east coast of the United States as far south as Miami and the Bahamas in the Caribbean.”

“The depth of the scours tells us that icebergs drifting to southern Florida were at least 1,000 feet, or 300 meters thick. This is enormous. Such icebergs are only found off the coast of Greenland today,” specialist Alan Condron said in a statement, as cited by Phys Org.

Alan Condron and colleagues say that the icebergs that scarred South Carolina's and Florida's seafloor thousands of years ago were sent on their journey south by Laurentide ice sheet meltwater that first worked its way into either Hudson Bay or the Gulf of St. Lawrence.

Who cares what icebergs were up to millennia ago?

If you've been keeping an eye on the news while going about your daily routine, you probably know that man-made climate change and global warming are now hard at work reshaping the Arctic and other frozen worlds that our planet is home to.

Researchers believe that, by gaining a better understanding of ocean circulation during the last ice age and other periods of time in Earth's history, they might be able to make better predictions about how said phenomena will affect meltwater and iceberg behavior on a global scale.

Image shows the marks left on the seafloor by the icebergs
Image shows the marks left on the seafloor by the icebergs
Map details the pathway taken by the icebergs
Map details the pathway taken by the icebergs

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Study finds massive icebergs once traveled long South Carolina's and Florida's coastlines
Image shows the marks left on the seafloor by the icebergsMap details the pathway taken by the icebergs
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