Newly recognized turbidity current structure can explain prolonged flushing of submarine canyons.

ABSTRACT: Seabed-hugging flows called turbidity currents are the volumetrically most important process transporting sediment across our planet and form its largest sediment accumulations. We seek to understand the internal structure and behavior of turbidity currents by reanalyzing the most detailed direct measurements yet of velocities and densities within oceanic turbidity currents, obtained from weeklong flows in the Congo Canyon. We provide a new model for turbidity current structure that can explain why these are far more prolonged than all previously monitored oceanic turbidity currents, which lasted for only hours or minutes at other locations. The observed Congo Canyon flows consist of a short-lived zone of fast and dense fluid at their front, which outruns the slower moving body of the flow

SUBMITTER: Azpiroz-Zabala M 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5627984 | biostudies-literature | 2017 Oct

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature