Red Sea tectonics unveil the largest known terrestrial ice stream: New constraints on Late Ordovician ice sheet dynamics Mohamed Elhebiry Western Michigan University https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0093-3404 Mohamed Sultan (
[email protected] ) Western Michigan University Abotalib Abotalib Western Michigan University Alan Kehew Western Michigan University Peter Voice Western Michigan University Ibrahim Abu El-Leil Al-Azhar University Article Keywords: Mega-streamlined Landforms, Landscape Evolution, Paleo-climate Models, Ice Sheet Reconstructions, Morphological-based Constraints Posted Date: July 6th, 2021 DOI: https://doi.org/10.21203/rs.3.rs-639303/v1 License: This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. Read Full License 1 Red Sea tectonics unveil the largest known terrestrial ice stream: New 2 constraints on Late Ordovician ice sheet dynamics 3 Authors 4 Mohamed S. Elhebiry1,2, Mohamed Sultan1*, Abotalib Z. Abotalib1,3, Alan E. Kehew1, Peter J. 5 Voice1, Ibrahim Abu El-Leil2 6 Affiliations 7 1Department of Geological and Environmental Sciences, Western Michigan University, 8 Michigan, USA. 9 2Geology Department, Al-Azhar University, Cairo, Egypt. 10 3Geology Department, National Authority for Remote Sensing and Space Sciences, Cairo, Egypt. 11 Abstract 12 Mega-streamlined landforms on Earth and Mars have been attributed to aeolian, glaciogenic, 13 fluvial, and tectonic processes. Identifying the forces that shaped these landforms is paramount 14 for understanding landscape evolution and constraining paleo-climate models and ice sheet 15 reconstructions. In Arabia, east-northeast, kilometer-scale streamlined landforms were 16 interpreted to have been formed by Quaternary aeolian erosion. We provide field and satellite- 17 based evidence for a Late Ordovician glacial origin for these streamlined landforms, which were 18 exhumed during the Red Sea–related uplift.