The Baltic Sea is a good example of a marine region with a complex coincidence of inter-ests ranging from research, administration, environmental protection and exploration. Detailed bathymetry data is necessary for many applications in these fields, and can be used for much more than ensuring safety of navigation at sea. The Baltic Sea Bathymetry Database (BSBD) has been developed to provide a harmonized bathymetry grid of the Baltic Sea, from survey data provided by the surrounding hydrographic offices. In this article we discuss the background on the BSBD production, and its reception by the public after its release.

In recent years large swathes of high resolution multibeam echo-sounding data (5-10 metre grid cells) from the Baltic Sea and Gulf of Bothnia have been collected for the Swedish Maritime Administration. These data reveal, with unprecedented clarity, glacial landforms associated with the flow and retreat of ice in these basins. Multiple generations of glacial lineations associated with Baltic and Finnish ice streams are resolved, and indicate their shifting geometry and evolving dynamics. Grounding line deposits at a variety of scales allow us to characterise the style and possible rates of retreat. Our data further offer a detailed view of a dynamic subglacial hydrological system on a sediment substrate: its locally varying patterns of incision and sediment deposition, the extent and connectivity of channelised networks, and the intimate relationship between meltwater landforms, ice-marginal deposits and subglacial bedforms. Here we present these data and explore some of their implications for processes of landform creation, large-scale sediment redistribution in the Bothnian and Baltic basins, the coupling between the glacial hydrological system and ice flow/retreat dynamics, and the regional palaeo-ice sheet history.

Bathymetry, the underwater topography, is a fundamental property of oceans, seas, and lakes. As such it is important for a wide range of applications, like physical oceanography, marine geology, geophysics and biology or the administration of marine resources. The exact requirements users may have regarding bathymetric data are, however, unclear. Here, the results of a questionnaire survey and a literature review are presented, concerning the use of Baltic Sea bathymetric data in research and for societal needs. It is demonstrated that there is a great need for detailed bathymetric data. Despite the abundance of high-quality bathymetric data that are produced for safety of navigation purposes, the digital bathymetric models publicly available to date cannot satisfy this need. Our study shows that DBMs based on data collected for safety of navigation could substantially improve the base data for administrative decision making as well as the possibilities for marine research in the Baltic Sea.

The International Bathymetric Chart of the Arctic Ocean (IBCAO) released its first gridded bathymetric compilation in 1999. The IBCAO bathymetric portrayals have since supported a wide range of Arctic science activities, for example, by providing constraint for ocean circulation models and the means to define and formulate hypotheses about the geologic origin of Arctic undersea features. IBCAO Version 3.0 represents the largest improvement since 1999 taking advantage of new data sets collected by the circum‐Arctic nations, opportunistic data collected from fishing vessels, data acquired from US Navy submarines and from research ships of various nations. Built using an improved gridding algorithm, this new grid is on a 500 meter spacing, revealing much greater details of the Arctic seafloor than IBCAO Version 1.0 (2.5 km) and Version 2.0 (2.0 km). The area covered by multibeam surveys has increased from ∼6% in Version 2.0 to ∼11% in Version 3.0.

Gridding heterogeneous bathymetric data sets for the compilation of Digital bathymetric models (DBMs), poses specific problems when there are extreme variations in source data density. This requires gridding routines capable of subsampling high-resolution source data while preserving as much as possible of the small details, at the same time as interpolating in areas with sparse data without generating gridding artifacts. A frequently used gridding method generalizes bicubic spline interpolation and is known as continuous curvature splines in tension. This method is further enhanced in this article in order to specifically handle heterogeneous bathymetric source data. Our method constructs the final grid through stacking several surfaces of different resolutions, each generated using the splines in tension algorithm. With this approach, the gridding resolution is locally adjusted to the density of the source data set: Areas with high-resolution data are gridded at higher resolution than areas with sparse source data. In comparison with some of the most widely used gridding methods, our approach yields superior DBMs based on heterogeneous bathymetric data sets with regard to preserving small bathymetric details in the high-resolution source data, while minimizing interpolation artifacts in the sparsely data constrained regions. Common problems such as artifacts from ship tracklines are suppressed. Even if our stacked continuous curvature splines in tension gridding algorithm has been specifically designed to construct DBMs from heterogeneous bathymetric source data, it may be used to compile regular grids from other geoscientific measurements.

The LOMROG 2007 expedition targeted the previously unexplored southern part of the Lomonosov Ridge north of Greenland together with a section from the Morris Jesup Rise to Gakkel Ridge. The oceanographic data show that Canadian Basin Deep Water (CBDW) passes the Lomonosov Ridge in the area of the Intra Basin close to the North Pole and then continues along the ridge towards Greenland and further along its northernmost continental slope. The CBDW is clearly evident as a salinity maximum and oxygen minimum at a depth of about 2000 m. The cross-slope sections at the Amundsen Basin side of the Lomonosov Ridge and further south at the Morris Jesup Rise show a sharp frontal structure higher up in the water column between Makarov Basin water and Amundsen Basin water. The frontal structure continues upward into the Atlantic Water up to a depth of about 300 m. The observed water mass division at levels well above the ridge crest indicates a strong topographic steering of the flow and that different water masses tend to pass the ridge guided by ridge-crossing isobaths at local topographic heights and depressions. A rough scaling analysis shows that the extremely steep and sharply turning bathymetry of the Morris Jesup Rise may force the boundary current to separate and generate deep eddies (C) 2010 Elsevier Ltd All rights reserved

The hypothesis of floating ice shelves covering the Arctic Ocean during glacial periods was developed in the 1970s. In its most extreme form, this theory involved a 1000 m thick continuous ice shelf covering the Arctic Ocean during Quaternary glacial maxima including the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM). While recent observations clearly demonstrate deep ice grounding events in the central Arctic Ocean, the ice shelf hypothesis has been difficult to evaluate due to a lack of information from key areas with severe sea ice conditions. Here we present new data from previously inaccessible, unmapped areas that constrain the spatial extent and timing of marine ice sheets during past glacials. These data include multibeam swath bathymetry and subbottom profiles portraying glaciogenic features on the Chukchi Borderland, southern Lomonosov Ridge north of Greenland, Morris Jesup Rise, and Yermak Plateau. Sediment cores from the mapped areas provide age constraints on the glaciogenic features. Combining these new geophysical and geological data with earlier results suggests that an especially extensive marine ice sheet complex, including an ice shelf, existed in the Amerasian Arctic Ocean during Marine Isotope Stage (MIS) 6. From a conceptual oceanographic model we speculate that the cold halocline of the Polar Surface Water may have extended to deeper water depths during MIS 6 inhibiting the warm Atlantic water from reaching the Amerasian Arctic Ocean and, thus, creating favorable conditions for ice shelf development. The hypothesis of a continuous 1000 m thick ice shelf is rejected because our mapping results show that several areas in the central Arctic Ocean substantially shallower than 1000 m water depth are free from glacial influence on the seafloor.

The development of the multibeam sonar was one of the major single breakthroughs in expanding our knowledge concerning the shape of the deep-sea floor and its interaction with ocean circulation and bottom processes. However, only a fraction of the World Ocean has been multibeam mapped. The bathymetry of the ice covered Arctic and Antarctic waters, for example, are still less known that the topography of several planets in our solar system. In 2007, Swedish ice breaker Oden was equipped with a deep-water multibeam system and an integrated chirp sonar subbottom profiler. Since this system was installed, Oden has carried out three major expeditions to the central Arctic Ocean and three to West Antarctica as well as shorter mapping missions in area soff Svalbard and eastern Greenland. The multibeam and chirp sonar were operated continuously during all these expeditions and mapped several previously unexplored deep-sea areas. In addition, we have used the system’scapability of logging the acoustic signal of the water column. Here we show multibeam swath bathymetric imagesand chirp sonar profiles from these expeditions providing insights into processes forming the seafloor morphology and the interaction between deep-sea currents and the seafloor.

Geophysical and geological observations from the Yermak Plateau and northern Svalbard margin : Implications for ice-sheet grounding and deep-keeled icebergs

Abstract Topography on land and bathymetry, its underwater depth equivalent, belong to the most fundamental attributes of the solid earth’s surface. Over two thirds of the earth is covered by water, with about 90 % of this area lying more,than 1000 m below,the sea surface. In contrast to the land area, most of the deep sea remains,largely unexplored,and to date the topography,of the Moon,or Mars is much,better known,than the bathymetry,of large parts of our own,planet. Deep sea ocean mapping,can directly be carried out with ship-bound echo sounders,or indirectly through,a remote,sensing method,known,as satellite altimetry. Modern,echo sounding,technology,allows for high resolution mapping,with unsurpassed,ac- curacy. Due to the vastness of the oceans, however, even after decades of mapping activity, the oceans are far from completely surveyed, and the echo soundings accumulated over the time with different, meanwhile,evolving technologies,are of highly vary- ing quality. Satellite altimetry, on the contrary, pro- vides virtually complete coverage of the entire globe, although,the achieved,resolution and accuracy is

The compilation of ocean-wide digital bathymetric models (DBM) requires specific features of the bathymetric data storage and great flexibility of the data processing chain. In this article a solution based upon a spatial relational database management system and a Geographical Information System front end is introduced, which will eventually serve the compilation of a new DBM of the North Atlantic Ocean. As shown in a preliminary case study, the abundance of sounding data-both single beam and multibeam-available in that area to date bears an extremely high potential to derive a DBM with much greater accuracy and resolution than the DBMs commonly used today.

A 3D structural model for the entire southwestern Baltic Sea and the adjacent onshore areas was created with the purpose to analyse the structural framework and the sediment distribution in the area. The model was compiled with information from several geological time-isochore maps and digital depth maps from the area and consists of six post-Rotliegend successions: The Upper Permian Zechstein; Lower Triassic; Middle Triassic; Upper Triassic–Jurassic; Cretaceous and Cenozoic. This structural model was the basis for a 3D backstripping approach, considering salt flow as a consequence of spatially changing overburden load distribution, isostatic rebound and sedimentary compaction for each backstripping step in order to reconstruct the subsidence history in the region. This method allows determination of the amount of tectonic subsidence or uplifting as a consequence of the regional stress field acting on the basin and was followed by a correlation with periods of active salt movement. In general, the successions above the highly deformed Zechstein evaporites reveal a thickening trend towards the Glückstadt Graben, which also experienced the highest amount of tectonic subsidence during the Mesozoic and Cenozoic. Two periods of accelerating salt movement in the area has been correlated with the E–W directed extension during the Late Triassic–Early Jurassic and later by the Late Cretaceous–Early Cenozoic inversion, suggesting that the regional stress field plays a key role in halokinesis. The final part of this work dealt with a neotectonic forward modelling in an attempt to predict the future topography when the system is in a tectonic equilibrium. The result reveals that many of the salt structures in the region are still active and that future coastline will run with a WNW–ESE trend, arguing that the compressional stresses related to the Alpine collision are the prime factor for the present-day landscape evolution.

A Data Model for Compiling Heterogeneous Bathymetric Soundings, and its Implementation in the North Atlantic