Ice Scour - Historical Perspective and Relevance

Historical Perspective and Relevance

It appears Charles Darwin speculated in 1855 about the possibility that icebergs could gouge the seabed as they drifted across isobaths (Weeks 2010, p. 391). Some discussion on the involvement of sea ice was brought up in the 1920s, but overall this phenomenon remained poorly studied by the scientific community up to the 1970s. At that time, ship-born sidescan sonar surveys in the Canadian Beaufort Sea began to gather actual evidence of this mechanism. Seabed gouges were subsequently observed further north, in the Canadian Arctic Archipelago, and in the Russian Arctic as well (Wadhams 2000, p. 72). Throughout that decade, seabed gouging by ice was investigated extensively. What sparked the sudden interest for this phenomenon was the discovery of oil near Alaska’s northern coastlines, and two related factors (Weeks 2010, p. 391): 1) the prospect that oilfields could abound in these waters, and 2) a consideration that pipelines would be involved in future production developments, as this appeared to be the most practical approach to bring this resource to the land. Since then, means of protecting subsea pipelines against ice action became an important concern (King 2011, Barrette 2011). An oil spill in this environment would be problematic in terms of detection and clean-up (McHale et al. 2000).

Scientists in fields of research other than offshore engineering have also addressed seabed gouging. For instance, biologists have linked regions of the seabed reshaped by seabed gouging by ice to the formation of black pools, seabed depressions filled with anoxic high-salinity water which are death traps for small marine organisms (Kvitek et al. 1998). However, because of the costs involved in gouging-related data production, the bulk of that work was financed by the oil & gas industry, and much of it was documented from an offshore engineering perspective.