QUANTIFICATION OF THE PLIOCENE-PLEISTOCENE EROSION OF THE BARENTS SEAFROM PRESENT-DAY BATHYMETRY

We present an attempt to quantify the Tertiary and Quaternary erosion on the Barents Shelf in a two step model. The first step is a tectonic ally related uplift in the order of 500-2000 m of the NW Barents Shelf in the Early Tertiary with subsequent erosion in the Eocene-Miocene p eriod and transport of 950,000 km(3) of erosional products to the sedi mentary basins on the southern and eastern Barents shelf and to the co ntinental margins to west and north. The second step involves a region al glacial erosion in Pliocene-Pleistocene times with removal of 1,280 ,000 km(3) of sediments that today are located in wedges along the wes tern and northern Barents Shelf margins. With the present-day topograp hy and bathymetry, the preglacial relief is reconstructed and used to calculate the glacial erosion by isostatic modelling. The results indi cate that the total erosion increases from 500-700 m in the Southern B arents Sea, to an excess of 2000 m in a zone from Spitsbergen to Franz Josephs Land. Planimetering of this erosional map gives a total of 1, 200,000 km(3) of eroded material, which agrees with the estimated 1,28 0,000 km(3) of material in the sedimentary wedges along the western an d northern Barents Shelf Margin.