Icebergs in Florida

In today's weird science news, icebergs in Florida. Yup:

Hill, Jenna C. and Alan Condron (2014). Subtropical icebergs scours and meltwater routing in the deglacial western North Atlantic. Nature Geoscience PUBLISHED ONLINE: 12 OCTOBER 2014 | DOI: 10.1038/NGEO2267.

Okay, so they recorded high resolution bathymetry of the continental shelf along the Carolinas and Florida coast. They noticed these big furrows that they apparently can attribute to the keels of icebergs dragging through the sediments. Then they ran ocean circulation simulations that showed that big meltwater discharges from Hudson Bay or the St. Lawrence during the last deglaciation could have pushed icebergs as far south as the tip of Florida, although they would have been more common further north, along the Carolina coast. These kinds of events ought to have provided bursts of cold fresh water. I wonder if signals from those events could have been recorded in coral or shellfish.

Pretty cool work! (No pun intended.)