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Submarine Geomorphology pp 185–206Cite as

Continental Shelf Landforms

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Abstract

Continental shelves comprise the zone adjacent to the continents, extending from the infralittoral to a marked change in slope known as the shelf break. The shelf break is located at a variable depth from 20 to 550 m, with a global average depth of 140 m. They develop in passive and active margins and can be dominated by different processes, which include tides, waves and currents. The present day geomorphology of the continental shelf comprises a wide variety of modern and relict features as a result of different controlling factors—geological structure, sea-level change, and sediment delivery and dispersal systems—acting at varying time scales. This chapter illustrates the most common landforms observed in siliciclastic continental shelves, with special attention to the processes that generate them. Landforms include consolidated bottoms, erosive morphologies, prograding landforms, bedforms, gas-related morphologies and anthropogenic features.

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Acknowledgements

This work is a contribution to the FORMED (CGL2012-33989) and ABIDES (CTM2015-65142-R) projects funded by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness. Our sincere appreciation goes to Marta Ribó for providing seafloor images.

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  1. Instituto de Ciencias del Mar, CSIC, Passeig Marítim de la Barceloneta, 37-49, 08003, Barcelona, Spain

    Ruth Durán & Jorge Guillén

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Correspondence to Ruth Durán .

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  1. Marine Geology & Seafloor Surveying Group, Department of Geosciences, Faculty of Science, University of Malta, Msida, Malta

    Aaron Micallef

  2. Institute of Geosciences, Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel, Kiel, Schleswig-Holstein, Germany

    Sebastian Krastel

  3. Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences, Università degli Studi Milano Bicocca, Milan, Italy

    Alessandra Savini

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Durán, R., Guillén, J. (2018). Continental Shelf Landforms. In: Micallef, A., Krastel, S., Savini, A. (eds) Submarine Geomorphology. Springer Geology. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-57852-1_11

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