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The up to 900 km broad shelves off East Siberia and northwest off Alaska, including the Chukchi Shelf and Borderland, are characterized by shallow water in the periphery of the Arctic Ocean, north of the Bering Strait. Seafloor investigations revealed the widespread presence of glacial bedforms, implying the former existence of grounded ice in this region. We discuss the erosion and deposition around and beneath ice sheets/shelves using a regional grid of 2D seismic reflection data, acquired in 2011 from R/V Marcus G. Langseth across the outer ~ 75 km of the Chukchi Shelf and the adjacent Chukchi Borderland. A high amplitude glacial base (GB) reflection extends over large parts of the shelf, separating glacial from preglacial strata. We define eleven seismic reflection characters, that we use to infer distinct depositional environments of glacial sediments. Thick well stratified sediments overlying the GB reflection in the south may have been impacted by fewer advance-retreat cycles than those near the northeastern and western shelf breaks. Here, the GB reflection pinches out at the seafloor next to reworked and eroded areas. Numerous meltwater channels, some up to several kilometers wide, together with grounding zone wedges and recessional moraines are hints for ice sheets in the Chukchi Region. These ice sheets built up a huge grounding zone wedge of 48 km × 75 km on the Chukchi Rise. More grounding zone wedges on the western sides of bathymetric highs of the Chukchi Borderland along with mega scale glacial lineations indicate later ice shelf advances from east during the late Quaternary. However, in the absence of deep sediment cores, the timing or origin of the ice grounding events cannot be fully reconstructed.

 

Abstract. One of the key components of this research has been the mapping of Antarctic bed topography and ice thickness parameters that are crucial for modelling ice flow and hence for predicting future ice loss andthe ensuing sea level rise. Supported by the Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research (SCAR), the Bedmap3 Action Group aims not only to produce newgridded maps of ice thickness and bed topography for the internationalscientific community, but also to standardize and make available all thegeophysical survey data points used in producing the Bedmap griddedproducts. Here, we document the survey data used in the latest iteration,Bedmap3, incorporating and adding to all of the datasets previously used forBedmap1 and Bedmap2, including ice bed, surface and thickness point data from all Antarctic geophysical campaigns since the 1950s. More specifically,we describe the processes used to standardize and make these and futuresurveys and gridded datasets accessible under the Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable (FAIR) data principles. With the goals of making the gridding process reproducible and allowing scientists to re-use the data freely for their own analysis, we introduce the new SCAR Bedmap Data Portal(https://bedmap.scar.org, last access: 1 March 2023) created to provideunprecedented open access to these important datasets through a web-map interface. We believe that this data release will be a valuable asset to Antarctic research and will greatly extend the life cycle of the data heldwithin it. Data are available from the UK Polar Data Centre: https://data.bas.ac.uk (last access: 5 May 2023​​​​​​​). See the Data availability section for the complete list of datasets.