Seismic Facies und Structure Interpretation from 2D Profiles in the Vicinity of Herschel Island, Yukon, Canada
Herschel Island (Qiqiktaruk in Inuvialuktun) in the southern Canadian Beaufort Sea was formed as an ice push moraine by the advance of the Laurentide Ice Sheet during the Last Glacial Maximum in the late Wisconsinan. In the vicinity of the island the Herschel Basin was formed contemporarily by that process. Nevertheless we are still lacking evidence for the basin generation and its evolution after creation and the ice sheet retreat. To gain new information about the depositional history and the conditions during and after generation of the basin, I studied seismic two-dimensional profiles from parametric echosounding that were recorded in the basin during expeditions in 2006 and 2013. A big part of the work of this thesis was constituted of the processing and enhancement of these profiles using the programs OpendTect and SeiSee to guarantee high quality datasets. The interpretation of those data together with older geohphysical and borehole logs improved our knowledge of the basin history. The structures and facies that were discovered by this analysis were formed in different states of the basin evolution and provide sufficient new data to reconstruct its generation and development as a depositional centre afterwards. The interpretation supports the hypothesis that the basin was formed as the Laurentide Ice Sheet advanced to its maximum extent, was exposed to the atmosphere after its retreat and became part of the Beaufort Sea after flooding subsequently. Additionally to its interpretation, the echosounding data was used to enhance the existing bathymetric data for the basin as the former maps were not convenient enough for future tasks.
AWI Organizations > Geosciences > (deprecated) Junior Research Group: COPER