Seafloor Sunday #88: Submarine Canyons Along West African Margin

This week's Seafloor Sunday is from the site Virtual Seismic Atlas, which is a gallery of seismic-reflection images donated to the scientific community largely by petroleum and marine geotechnical companies and some other sources. The images are for anyone to use for education purposes. There's some great stuff in there, I know I'll be using the site quite a bit.

Above is a perspective image of the seafloor offshore the west African country of Equatorial Guinea showing the continental shelf edge (red) deepening to the continental slope (green to blue). The features of note are the various canyons, gullies, and channels dissecting the continental slope. Here's the blurb straight from the Virtual Seismic Atlas page about these features:

Submarine canyon morphologies and their downslope evolution, shown by a time structure map of the modern Equatorial Guinean seafloor. The stark contrast between canyon morphologies results from differing sediment supply. In the south, high sediment supply forms steep slopes and shelf-indenting, sand-rich canyons with erosive morphologies and downslope submarine fans. The capture of sediment by these canyons starve the area to the north, where canyons are smooth, have aggradational morphologies, no shelf-edge indentation, mud-rich fill, and no downslope sediment accumulation.

And if you want to know even more about these submarine canyons and gullies check out this paper by Jobe et al. that came out earlier this year.

Image: Differing submarine canyon morphologies offshore Equatorial Guinea / submitted by research geologist Zane Jobe (@ZaneJobe) to Virtual Seismic Atlas