Melt-out till and ribbed moraine formation, a case study from south Sweden

Hummocky moraine with dispersed agglomerations of ribbed moraine - here named 'Åsnen-type ribbed moraine' - forms a 20-40 km wide zone over SmÃ¥land, south Sweden, terminated to the north by a sharp boundary to streamlined terrain. The hummocky/ribbed moraine zone can be geomorphologically linked to the subaqueous Göteborg Moraine, formed at an oscillation/stand-still phase during the deglaciation of the Swedish west coast. Based on detailed sedimentological and structural investigations of ribbed moraine ridges it is concluded that diamict sequences and associated sorted sediment were deposited due to passive melt-out from stagnant, debris-rich ice with synsedimentary deposition of sorted sediments, preferentially at a melting ice/bed interface. To accommodate for the geomorphological expression, such an interpretation further implies that debris-rich ice formed in an intermediate adfreezing zone between ice at the pressure-melting point and a frontal frozen zone at deglaciation. Basal debris-rich ice was stacked into transversally arranged zones (controlled moraine), forming ribbed moraine 'embryos', the active phase of ridge formation. The stacked sequences of debris-rich ice eventually melted out beneath a stable and melt-retarding supraglacial ablation complex to form the final moraine ridges, the passive phase of ridge formation. In areas with no stable supraglacial ablation complex, the resulting landform after final de-icing was a hummocky moraine landscape. Internal composition of moraine hummocks suggests that most of them are composed of sediment gravity flow sediments, intercalated with stream-deposited sediments, all resting on a platform of subglacial melt-out till. De-icing of the zone now occupied by hummocky and ribbed moraine took a considerable time; deglacial 14C age differences from lake basins on either side of the geomorphic boundary to the streamlined terrain indicate a separation between active and stagnant ice along that boundary, and that it took another 200-300 yr for the stagnant ice zone to melt during the final formation of present-day landforms.