Geophysical reconstruction of the late Holocene proximal proglacial landsystem at Skeiðarársandur, southeast Iceland

Sandur plains are extensive sedimentary bodies formed in proglacial settings by glaciofluvial processes. Icelandic sandar have been hypothesised to be comprised of thick alluvial successions that provide critical insight into the processes contributed their formation and evolution. However, to-date, most research has focused on analysis associated topographically-confined small-scale systems. These, however, do not capture variety or scale influence architecture. Therefore, detailed subsurface large-scale unconfined is vital understand how these systems respond fundamental drivers, such as: (i) glacier oscillations, (ii) episodic sediment flux from outburst floods (aka. jökulhlaups). We report an extensive, low-frequency (40 & 100 MHz) ground-penetrating radar (GPR) survey ice-proximal component a ( ~ 1300 km 2 $\unicode{x0007E}1300\,{\text{km}}^{2}$ ) active sandur southeast Iceland. A bright continuous reflection (PR1) identified within all radargrams provides boundary between pre-LIA LIA present-day sedimentation. GPR data reveals ~50 m wedge attributed jökulhlaup surge-related activity during Little Ice Age (LIA). An approximate rate deposition 0.2–0.65 − 1 ${{\rm{a}}}^{-1}$ calculated for above PR1. Furthermore, we propose sandur-wide, ice marginal limit Skeiðarárökull, Iceland, based observations reported here previous work.