Title
The impact of erosion and sedimentation in shaping palaeogeography: insights from numerical modelling of the Barents Sea
Abstract
Landscapes preserve Earth’s history, yet much of that record is missing. Erosion removes material from the surface, while sedimentation preserves parts of that history elsewhere. The same principles shaped the world’s northernmost mountain belt, the Eurekan Orogeny. The eroded fragments have contemporaneously filled kilometre-deep oceanic basins alongside the development of Earth’s slowest seafloor spreading (Gakkel Ridge). Moreover, the opening of the Fram Strait remains debated in terms of the timing, nature, and evolution. How effectively does erosion shape the Arctic topography? What role do different sedimentary processes play in transporting and distributing Earth’s archive into the evolving oceanic basins? Here, we use coupling Badlands codes and GPlates to simulate the sedimentary source-to-sink system and basin filling during the tectonic plate separation between the Lomonosov Ridge and the northern Barents Shelf. I will present numerical modelling results as part of the framework of the BRAVO (Barents Sea Evolution) project, a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Global Fellowship between the University of Sydney and the University of Oslo.