Formerly-glaciated areas are vital environments for understanding the rates of and processes of ice-mass retreat, providing analogues for improving our understanding of present-day ice masses and their response to recent and future climatic warming. Geological and geophysical records of formerly-glaciated margins on continental shelves and within large marine basins provide a wealth of landform, sediment and stratigraphic assemblages that reveal ice sheet flow and retreat dynamics over glacial-interglacial cycles. Most of the ice-sheets that produced these continental shelf archives were marine-based, grounded below sea level. These are some of the most dynamic and sensitive parts of the modern cryosphere, and are also amongst the hardest to predict the behaviour of, producing large uncertainties in predictions of future ice-sheet change in response to oceanic and atmospheric forcing.
The proliferation of geophysical technology and datasets, such as multibeam echosounder, high-resolution, 2D and 3D seismic and subsurface profiling, core logging coupled to sedimentology and palaeoenvironmental analyses, enable us to access sedimentological, stratigraphic and morphological archives of ice-ocean-sedimentary systems on formerly-glaciated continental shelves.
We invite papers on themes including past ice-flow dynamics in marine-based ice sheets, grounding line behaviour, palaeo-ice stream, shear margin and subglacial processes, the role of meltwater on glaciological systems, and on ice-ocean interactions, including ice shelf behaviour, as well as submerged archives from rarely occurring terrestrially-terminating ice sheets. Additionally, we strongly encourage contributions that develop and integrate multiple data types, and that couple geological and geophysical methods with numerical modelling of ice sheets.