Going With The Flow: Understanding Sedimentary Processes on the Hawke Bay Continental Slope

Abstract

Submarine density flows are one of the most important processes for transporting sediment in the undersea environment. They are critical in the dispersion of terrigenous sediment from the shelf to deep basins along continental slope margins. Submarine basins located on continental slope margins provide depocentres for marine and terrestrial sediment accumulation and preservation, which is useful in gravity ow and paleoenvironmental reconstruction. The Hikurangi Subduction Margin (HSM) is an active area of deformation, hosting a complex trench, slope, basin and ridge morphology o the east coast of the North Island, New Zealand. Hawke Bay is a section of this continental slope which is characterised by weakly connected, semi-confined, elongate basins, sepa-rated by thrust-fault and anticlinal ridges. This study utilises 6 cores collected from basins on the Hawke Bay continental slope, and high resolution multi-beam bathymetric data to analyse sedi-mentological, paleontological and bathymetric properties of sedimentary processes occurring in and between basins on the Hawke Bay continental slope......