Open access data repository of Late-Pleistocene and Holocene paleo-shorelines along the Antarctic Peninsula and South Shetland Islands coasts

Abstract

An improved understanding of the chronology of Antarctic ice sheet deglaciation since the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM) represents a fundamental tool to better define the origin of past and future meltwater influx in the global oceans. Relict shorelines and other evidence of past Relative Sea Level (RSL) evolution were widely used to understand past ice sheet history and to improve predictions of climate-sea level relationship evolution. In the last decades, RSL data in the Antarctic region have been mostly produced using a wide range of geomorphic evidence such as beach and marine deposits, marine terraces and isolation basins. However, the lack of a geographic common framework that includes data derived from different sources, limits the accessibility to the information. Here we present a new cartographic approach to create an open access geodatabase of the postglacial paleo-shorelines by using a standard collecting pattern. Cartographic Antarctica Repository (CAR) includes RSL data along the coasts of the Antarctic Peninsula and South Shetland Islands. Results show the advantages to use CAR for integrating data and supporting spatial analyses, by representing an easy and usable tool for the improvement of shoreline evolution definition and the planning of Antarctic coast investigations. CAR is dynamic repository project that will be further expanded on other Antarctic regions too, integrating fully into the wide reference context of the free access Antarctic datasets.