Palynomorphs of ice rafted clastic sedimentary rocks in Late Quaternary glacial marine sediments of the Norwegian Sea as provenance indicators

Palynomorph assemblages of ice rafted pebbles of clastic sedimentary rocks in surface sediments from 0 to 41 cm depth of the Norweigan Sea are dominated by Triassic and Lower Cretaceous taxa along with occasional Jurassic, Lower Paleozoic, and very rare Carboniferous-Permian taxa. Tertiary species were not found, and Upper Cretaceous species were only found in the western Norweigan Sea. The ice-rafted rock fragments originated from the Late Pleistocene ice sheets adjacent to the Norwegian Sea. The determined ages of the ice-rafted clastic sedimentary rocks indicate the Barents shelf as the main source, because the Barents shelf has exposures of clastic sedimentary rocks whose ages and lithologies match the material found in the majority of the analyzed samples. In addition some material originated from the West Norwegian shelf and some from NE Greenland. Our results confirm that an ice sheet extending from SW Svalbard onto parts of the northwestern Barents shelf existed during the Late Weichselian. The northern dropstone source areas suggest that currents in the Norwegian Sea from 15 to 9 ka before present were moving in the opposite direction of modern currents