Sediment distribution of the Greenland Sea and the Fram Strait

Abstract

Recent drilling in the Norwegian Sca (Leg 104) has established that 1) the inflow of warm Atlantic water of the Norwegian Currcnt has responded to glacial-interglacial climatic changes of the northern hemisphere since 2.56Ma (Jansen et al. 1987). and 2) that repeated sediment layers with a significant contribution of coarse, ice-rafted terrigenous dcbrisdocument more than 26 phases of ice cover of varying duration during this time span (Jansen et al. unpublished). Because input of saline Atlantic water is an important element of deep and bottom water formation in the modern Norwegian-Greenland Sea (see recent discussion by Swift (1986)), fluctuating Atlantic water inflow and sea-ice cover may be expected to have caused largescale changes in deep water circulation over the past 2.5 my.