New Zealand’s coastline in the ice age
In the last major glacial period some 20,000 years ago, New Zealand’s land area was much larger, as the sea was 120–30 metres lower than its present level. The three main islands were joined together as a single island. During this period, rivers such as the Clutha, Rakaia and Waimakariri carried huge loads of sediment all the way to the edge of the continental shelf. The Waikato River (dashed line) originally flowed north and entered the sea on the eastern side of the North Island. About 20,000 years ago it changed to its present course.
http://www.teara.gov...oor-geology/3/1
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http://www.teara.gov...floor-geology/4
"Great South Basin"
http://www.gns.cri.n...edbasins_4.html
"Head of Bounty Trough"
http://baby.indstate...ginsBounty5.jpg
http://baby.indstate...ez/margins.html
In the Eastern South Island Sedimentary System there is a rich record of contiguous sedimentary deposits contained in fluvial terraces, lakes, shelf edge clinoforms, canyon and fans throughout an entire glacioeustatic sea-level cycle. Under highstand conditions sediment shed from the actively rising New Zealand Alps is stored in lakes, terrestrial gravel fans, and on the shelf, where the sediment cover is a mixture of modern, relict and palimpsest deposits. Under lowstand conditions the rivers extend to canyon heads and discharge directly into the Bounty Trough. In the Waipaoa Sedimentary System sediment generated/mobilized from primary hillslope source areas by large magnitude, low frequency storm events is primarily sequestered on the floodplain and shelf.
The Eastern South Island Sedimentary System, comprising the Clutha, Waitaki and Rangitata river basins discharges onto a passive margin with a broad continental shelf. The major rivers constitute a line source and northward flowing, along-strike, currents influence sediment dispersal patterns offshore. Both onshore and offshore, the system is more complex than that of the Waipaoa. Thus, balancing the modern highstand sediment budgets is more difficult, but still feasible. At lowstand the system discharges into the Bounty Trough and Fan, and is virtually closed. The strength of this subarea lies in the rich record of terrestrial events (preserved in contiguous sedimentary deposits contained in terraces, lakes, shelf edge clinoforms, canyons and fans) for an entire glacioeustatic sea-level cycle, or longer. The focus here is, therefore, on larger scales, both spatial (~35 000 km2 source, ~250 000 km2 sink) and temporal (~105 kyr).
Although within sight of the transcurrent Alpine Fault section of the Australian/Pacific plate boundary, the eastern South Island margin to the south of Banks Peninsula, is a stable passive margin. The broad shelf experiences high sediment input from the actively rising New Zealand Alps, a strong imprint from eustatic changes in sea level, and a moderately vigorous along-shelf circulation system. The shelf between the Clutha and Rangitata is typically 30 to 80 km wide but reduces to 10 km off Otago Peninsula. The shelf break is at 125 to 165 m water depth and is locally indented by the heads of submarine canyons feeding the channel system in Bounty Trough. Shelf morphology is variable with zones of featureless seabed interspersed with ridge and swale topography, terraces and changes in slope that represent palaeoshorelines formed at previous stillstands of sea level.
Within the Waipaoa Sedimentary System, hinterland to shelf transport may be accomplished in tens to hundreds of hours. This permits attention to be focused on the conditions under which specific erosion events in the hinterland are translated to depositional sites on the floodplain and shelf. The major rivers of the Eastern South Island Sedimentary System constitute a line source and northward flowing, along-strike, currents influence sediment dispersal patterns offshore (sands are deposited on the inner shelf, muds move northward, and the Bounty Fan is inactive), though lakes now trap much of the sediment load of the Clutha and Waitaki rivers. The situation changes at lowstand, when the lakes are effaced by glaciation, the rivers discharge close to the head of Bounty Trough and sediment captured by submarine channels is transported by turbidity currents 900 km eastward to the Bounty Fan.
http://baby.indstate...ez/margins.html
http://baby.indstate...ginsBounty4.jpg
http://clasticdetrit...re-new-zealand/
http://bulletin.geos...act/121/1-2/134
The bounty channel system: A 55-million-year-old sediment conduit to the deep sea, Southwest Pacific Ocean
Abstract The Bounty Channel system is located within the Bounty Trough, a Cretaceous rift on the eastern edge of the New Zealand microcontinent. Today, the system is fed with sediment from the eastern South Island shelf, through the Otago Fan complex. The main Bounty Channel is about 800 km long and forms a sediment transport link between the continental margin and the distal Bounty Fan, located at the mouth of the Bounty Trough and onlapping onto abyssal oceanic crust. The Bounty Channel system has existed in its present setting since the inception of the Alpine Fault plate boundary in the mid-Cenozoic, while ancestral marine channel systems occur back to the Paleocene.
http://www.springerl...3174n48777n702/
Evolution of Pliocene to Recent abyssal sediment waves on Bounty Channel levees, New Zealand
Abstract
Levees bordering Bounty Channel 900 km east of New Zealand accommodate a 400 m-thick sequence (maximum) of sediment waves that have formed since Pliocene times. These bedforms, with amplitudes of 2–17 m and wavelengths of 0.6–6 km occur in 4100–4900 m of water and were formed by turbidity currents, as indicated by their restriction to levee backslopes, the frequent occurrence of turbidites in cores and the preferential but not exclusive development of waves on the left-bank levee in accord with the Southern Hemisphere coriolis deflection.
The wave field was instigated in the Late Pliocene when glacially lowered sea level allowed rivers draining the Southern Alps of South Island to discharge directly into Bounty Channel and its attendant canyons. The field grew vertically through the coalescence of small waves into larger bedforms that continually migrated across and up levee backslopes at an average rate of 5.6m/100 yrs. Wave growth decreased into the Late Pleistocene probably in response to progressive containment of turbidity currents as the relief of Bounty Channel increased to 200 m or more.
The glacial periods of wave growth were interrupted by interglacial interludes of quiescence when the field was draped mainly by pelagic calcareous ooze.
http://www.sciencedi...0d2e0bf5c704c1d