Ice Scour - Seabed Survey For Gouges

Seabed Survey For Gouges

Seabed gouging by ice is an eminently discreet phenomenon: little sign of it can be observed from above the water surface – the odd evidence includes sea floor sediments incorporated into the ice (Weeks 2010, p. 391). Information of interest on these gouges includes: depth, width, length and orientation (King 2011, Barrette 2011). Gouging frequency – the number of gouges produced at a given location per unit time – is another important parameter. To this day, this kind of information has been gathered by means of seabed mapping with ship-borne instrumentation, typically a fathometer: echo sounding devices such as a side-scan and a multi-beam sonar systems (Weeks 2010, p. 392). Repetitive mapping involves repeating these surveys a number of times, at an interval ranging from a few to several years (e.g. Blasco et al. 1998, Sonnichsen et al. 2005).