Geological constraints on Antarctic palaeo‐ice‐stream retreat

Abstract Submarine landforms preserved in bathymetric troughs on the Antarctic continental shelf show that the style of ice stream retreat across the shelf following the last glacial maximum varied between different troughs. Three styles of retreat are inferred from the geological evidence: rapid, episodic and slow. Rapid retreat by ice stream floatation and calving is recorded by the preservation of a landform assemblage of unmodified streamlined subglacial bedforms including mega‐scale glacial lineations (MSGLs) that record streaming flow along these troughs. These elongate bedforms are not overprinted by recessional glacial landforms formed transverse to ice flow such as moraines or grounding‐zone wedges, and overlying deglacial sediments are thin. A second type of landform assemblage consists of MSGLs overprinted or interrupted by transverse grounding‐zone wedges. This assemblage implies episodic retreat between successive grounding‐zone positions. The third type of landform assemblage is that of numerous, closely spaced, recessional moraines and intermittent grounding‐zone wedges that overlie and interrupt MSGLs. This assemblage records the slow retreat of grounded ice across the shelf. Variation in the style of ice stream retreat between the different bathymetric troughs indicates that Antarctic palaeo‐ice‐streams did not respond uniformly to external forcing at the end of the last glacial cycle. Rather, their diachronous retreat reflects the dominance of local controls in the form of bathymetry and drainage basin size. More broadly, these data show that retreat of marine‐based ice sheets in areas of reverse bed slope is not necessarily catastrophic, and they provide important constraints for numerical models that attempt to predict the dynamics of large polar ice sheets. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.