1300 km long late Pleistocene-Holocene shelf edge barrier reef system along the western continental shelf of India: occurrence and significance

The occurrence, acoustic characteristics, and significance of submerged reefs on the continental shelf edge and upper slope, northern South China Sea

“…The upper part has a low-frequency strong-reflection top interface and evident diffraction; the inside has a weak and disordered reflection structure or does not have a reflection structure. These reflection facies are also similar to those of outcropping and buried coral reefs (Orme and Salama, 1988;Vora et al, 1996;Van Rooij et al, 2011). In the 250-ms strata beneath the seafloor of the study area, there are two main reflection interfaces (Rf2 and Rf1, respectively, from the top down; see Fig.…”

“…In recent years, a large number of acoustic sounding data (including multibeam bathymetry, subbottom profile, side-scan sonar, and seismic data) have been collected from the outer continental shelf near ZD36-13. These data show some similar acoustic characteristics to those of submerged or buried coral reefs and knolls on other continental shelves and continental slopes, such as the GBR (Orme and Salama, 1988;Abbey et al, 2011;Webster et al, 2012), the submerged coral reefs on the outer edge of the western Indian continental shelf (Vora et al, 1996), and the cold-water corals on the continental slope of the Ionian Sea (Savini and Corselli, 2010), etc. Using previous research discoveries of native coral reefs (e.g., Liu et al, 1993) and based on various collected geophysical data, in this paper we aim to 1. describe in detail the morphology and distribution of submerged reefs on the shelf edge and upper slope in the study area, 2. identify their formation age, environment, and control factors, and 3. discuss their paleoenvironmental significance.…”

“…Usually, the early existing topographic high is favorable to the development of coral reefs (Shinn et al, 1977;Vora et al, 1996). As can be seen from the topographic map, the submerged reef distribution areas are underwater plateaus evidently protruding toward the sea.…”

“…Previous studies have shown that there are also submerged reefs in many tropical island surroundings and continental shelves, such as the Caribbean Sea (Macintyre,1972;Lighty et al, 1978;Fairbanks, 1989;Hubbard et al, 1990;Blanchon et al, 2002;Jarrett et al, 2005), the Seychelles Islands (Stoddart, 1971), Madagascar (Pichon, 1977;Guilcher, 1988), the Bahamas Islands (Hine and Steinmetz, 1984), the edge of the western Indian continental shelf (Wagle et al, 1994;Colonna et al, 1996;Vora et al, 1996;Dullo et al, 1998;Rao et al, 2003) in the Indian Ocean, Papua New Guinea (Guilcher, 1988;Galewsky et al, 1996), the Fiji Islands (Guilcher, 1988), the Hawaiian Islands (Veeh, 1966;Ku et al, 1974;Szabo et al, 1994;Muhs and Szabo, 1994;Muhs, 2002;Webster et al, 2004Webster et al, , 2010Hearty et al, 2007), the outer edge of the Florida continental shelf (Lighty, 1977), and the Gulf of Carpentaria (Harris et al, 2004) and the outer edge of the Great Barrier Reef (GBR) (Veeh and Veevers, 1970;Harris and Davies, 1989) in Australia in the Pacific Ocean. These submerged reefs in the continental shelves, such as the 1300 km-long submerged reefs distributed on the outer edge of the western Indian continental shelf (Vora et al, 1996), were mainly formed during the last glacial period, whereas the submerged reefs around oceanic volcanic islands, such as the Hawaiian Island of Lanai (Webster et al, 2010), have longer formation histories Compared with modern coral reefs, submerged coral reefs not only reflect the shelf ...…”

Successive reef depositional events along the Marquesas foreslopes (French Polynesia) since 26 ka

“…Drowned reefs were dated in Barbados (Fairbanks, 1989) and Hawai'i (Webster et al, 2004(Webster et al, , 2006. But in many areas, submerged reefs have only been located and observed but not dated as in the Pacific Ocean (Rougerie et al, 1992;Beaman et al, 2008), the Indian Ocean (Wagle et al, 1994;Vora et al, 1996) and the Caribbean Sea (Adey et al, 1977;Macintyre et al, 1991). Many of these reefs were interpreted to be the consequence of abrupt changes in sea-level during the last deglacial sea-level rise, reported as brief periods of accelerated ice cap melting that would have been accompanied by rapid jumps in sea-level.…”