HR: 0800h
AN: OS41D-0511 [Abstracts]
TI: Experimental Investigation on Submarine Channel Formation
AU: * M‚tivier, F
EM: metivier@ipgp.jussieu.fr
AF: Groupe de Recherche Sur l'‚rosion et les eaux continentales, Lab. de dynamique des systŠmes g‚ologiques,
Institut de Physique du Globe de Paris, 2 Place Jussieu, Paris, 75251
France
AU: Lajeunesse, E
EM: lajeunes@ipgp.jussieu.fr
AF: Groupe de Recherche Sur l'‚rosion et les eaux continentales, Lab. de dynamique des systŠmes g‚ologiques,
Institut de Physique du Globe de Paris, 2 Place Jussieu, Paris, 75251
France
AU: Lancien, P
EM: lancien@ipgp.jussieu.fr
AF: Groupe de Recherche Sur l'‚rosion et les eaux continentales, Lab. de dynamique des systŠmes g‚ologiques,
Institut de Physique du Globe de Paris, 2 Place Jussieu, Paris, 75251
France
AU: Cacas, M
EM: M-Christine.CACAS@ifp.fr
AF: Institut Fran‡ais du P‚trole, Direction G‚ologie-G‚ochimie, 1-4 av. de Bois-Preau, Rueil-Malmaison,
92852
France
AB:
Submarine mega fans and their associated canyons have long attracted the attention of a large community in the Earth sciences
because they record the history of past erosional processes. As such their morphology and sedimentary infill may be of use
to unravel past climatic and tectonic evolutions. Yet despite an important corpus of research on their structural
characteristics we lack a well accepted quantitative description for the dynamics of the formation and growth of these
sedimentary systems. One of the main reasons for this lies in our inability to successfully understand, reproduce and predict
the dynamics of the channel systems, tens to hundreds of meters deep, several kilometres in width, and hundreds of
kilometres in length, that build submarine fans. Here we report on a series of small-scale laboratory experiments on the
formation of sub aqueous channels and lobes. Our experiments show that steady flow of a dense current on a bed of light
particles can induce both spontaneous formation of channels longer than a few channel widths and spontaneous meandering.
DE: 8105 Continental margins and sedimentary basins
DE: 4558 Sediment transport
DE: 3022 Marine sediments--processes and transport
DE: 3045 Seafloor morphology and bottom photography
SC: Ocean Sciences [OS]
MN: 2004 AGU Fall Meeting