8 Highly Variable Submarine Landscapes in the Alborán Sea Created by Cold-Water Corals

Abstract

Impressive seafloor structures formed by cold-water corals characterise parts of the seafloor in the southeastern Alboran Sea, forming the East Melilla Cold-Water Coral Mound Province. These geomorphological features are composed of a mixture of cold-water coral fragments and hemipelagic sediments, displaying typical coral mound deposits. Along a N-S transect across the Mediterranean Moroccan margin, extending for up to ~25 km, three belts of very differently shaped mound structures occur. Their morphologies and dimensions vary considerably, ranging from up to 20-km-long and 150-m-high steep ridges to elongated and arcuate mounds of a few hundred meters in diameter and up to 40 m in height. Obviously, different interacting drivers, including tectonics and hydrodynamics, must have been involved at a variable scale in shaping these fascinating submarine landscapes in the past.