Turbidity-current and debris-flow pathways to the Cape Verde Basin: status of long-range side-scan sonar (GLORIA) surveys

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Abstract
Summary: A regional GLORIA survey in the southern Cape Verde Basin identified highly variable patterns of backscattering intensity that were interpreted as resulting from seabed roughness and small-scale slope changes. It was inferred that their origin was linked to turbidity-current pathways across the continental rise. Farther north, a survey of the Saharan Continental Rise SE of Madeira identified even more spectacular changes in backscattering. Follow-up 3.5 kHz echo-sounder surveys together with core-sampling and bottom-camera studies allowed an assignment of acoustic facies to sediment type. In this area turbidity-current channels and deposits have been overrun by long-range debris flows resulting from the late-Quaternary Saharan sediment slide. Preliminary results of a further GLORIA survey that links the previously studied areas with a single swath along the continental rise are reported in this paper. The resulting sonographs show details of submarine-slide-debris-flow complexes on this margin that had previously been mapped from 3.5 kHz records. They extend across the lower continental rise to the plain areas. Others do not extend as far as the lower rise. Debris flows can no longer be thought of as unequivocal indicators of proximality in the geological record.