Experimental Investigation on Submarine Channels Inception

Experimental investigation on submarine channels inception LANCIEN Pierre LAJEUNESSE Eric MÉTIVIER François IPGP CACAS Marie-Christine IFP Submarine mega fans and their associated canyons have long attracted the attention of a large community in the Earth sciences because they record the history of past erosional processes. As such their morphology and sedimentary infill may be of invaluable use to unravel past climatic and tectonic evolutions. Yet despite an important corpus of research on their structural characteristics [1-10] we lack a well accepted quantitative description for the dynamics of the formation and growth of these sedimentary systems. One of the main reasons