Sea-Floor Sunday #44: Bounty Trough, offshore New Zealand

One of the deep-marine sedimentary systems I’ve been wanting to learn more about is an area offshore of the east coast of the South Island of New Zealand.

Before showing you the image of the week, below is a map from GoogleEarth showing the location of the Bounty Trough, which is an east-west-trending trough interpreted as a remnant continental rift (bounded by the Chatham Rise to the north and the Campbell Plateau to the south).

New Zealand with the Bounty Trough region highlighted (image: GoogleEarth)

The white box highlights the area shown in the image below. I’ve rotated the image (north is to the right) to take advantage of the more vertical layout of this blog. Warm colors (reds and oranges) are shallower water and cool colors (blues) are deeper water. The width of the image is approximately 230 km.

Bounty Trough, offshore New Zealand (credit: NSF Margins http://baby.indstate.edu/gomez/margins.html ;note - image is rotated, north is to the right)

Note the tributary submarine canyons/channels coalescing into a single axial conduit down-system.

Click on the image to go to the source and learn more.

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Here are a couple of recent papers about this deep-marine sedimentary system. See references therein for much more:

• Uenzelmann-Neben et al., 2009, Neogene sediment structures in Bounty Trough, eastern New Zealand: Influence of magmatic and oceanic current activity: GSA Bulletin [link].
• Shapiro et al., 2007, Petrology and provenance of sand in the Bounty submarine fan, New Zealand: GSA Special Paper 420 [link].

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To see all the Sea-Floor Sunday posts click here.

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