Ice scour is a geological term for long, narrow ditches in a seabed, created by the collision of fast ice and pack ice and the grounding of icebergs. Synonyms include ice gouging, ice ploughing, ice score and keel scour. This phenomenon is common along the northern coast of Alaska and in the Bering Sea along its costal waters.
It may also refer to ice sheets in the intertidal, which upon movement of the ice, creates physical abrasion and possible dislodgment of marine organisms.
Regions of the seabed reshaped by ice scour have been linked to the formation of black pools, seabed depressions filled with anoxic high-salinity water which are death traps for small marine organisms. [1]