Sea-Floor Sunday #67: Hudson submarine canyon

This week’s Sea-Floor Sunday is a nice shaded relief bathymetric image* of the Hudson submarine canyon region offshore of New York and New Jersey (see map at bottom of post for regional context). The image is courtesy of this 2006 U.S. Geological Survey Open File Report where you can learn much more and see other images.

I’ve rotated these images such that north is to the upper right corner. In this first image the width is approximately 100 km (60 miles). The top of the image is more-or-less the edge of the continental shelf, which is about 400 m (1,300 ft) deep. The bottom of the image is well onto the continental slope and greater than 3,000 m (9,800 ft) of water depth. Note how the Hudson canyon (and other smaller canyons) incise across the steepest section of the shelf edge and uppermost slope.

Shaded relief bathymetry, Hudson submarine canyon (credit: USGS Open File Report 2004-1441; http://pubs.usgs.gov/of/2004/1441/html/figures.html)

The image below zooms in on the upper reaches of the canyon. The relatively flat floor of the canyon near the bottom of the image is about a kilometer wide to give you a sense of scale.

Shaded relief bathymetry, Hudson submarine canyon (credit: USGS Open File Report 2004-1441; http://pubs.usgs.gov/of/2004/1441/html/figures.html)

Here’s a snapshot from Google Earth for regional context.

–  Also see this post from 2007 about the Hudson Shelf Valley.

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* FYI: I opened the PDF file in Illustrator and deleted all the linework and annotation to highlight just the shaded relief