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The Ocean Floor

Investigating fluid-rock interaction at the backstop to the Mediterranean Ridge Accretionary Complex South of Crete (SO278)

Dec 1, 2020
Mediterranean
Research area of SO278
Working areas of SONNE cruise SO278 within the EEZ of Greece and Italy.

 

The "FRINGE" ex­ped­i­tion to the Hel­lenic and Ca­lab­rian arc of the Medi­ter­ranean sub­duc­tion zone with re­search ship SONNE (SO278) is part of the Bre­men Cluster of Ex­cel­lence at MARUM "The Ocean Floor – Earth’s un­charted In­ter­face". The fluid and rock in­vest­ig­a­tions of spe­cific fluid and gas dis­charge areas at the sea floor of the Medi­ter­ranean Sea are part of the re­search area RE­ACTOR, whereby Theme 1 (sea­wa­ter crust in­ter­ac­tions) and Theme 3 (pro­cesses and dy­nam­ics of vents and seeps) are dir­ectly af­fected.

The greater part of ex­ped­i­tion SO278 will be car­ried out in the Hel­lenic arc, the so-called Medi­ter­ranean ridge (Figs. 1-2) South of Crete in Greece. There, fluid dis­charge areas are ex­plored us­ing hy­dro-acous­tic meth­ods, meas­ured with high res­ol­u­tion and ex­amined with sev­eral core devices (grav­ity corer, mul­ticorer, minicorer) and tem­per­at­ure meas­ure­ments. The smal­ler part of the in­vest­ig­a­tions is car­ried out on mud vol­ca­noes in the Ca­lab­rian ac­cre­tion­ary com­plex in Italy.

In ad­di­tion to the sta­tion work in the Hel­lenic arc, we are plan­ning to per­form sta­tion work in the Ca­lab­rian arc within the EEZ of Italy. The goal is to bet­ter un­der­stand dy­namic pro­cesses of Sar­tori and Cetus mud vol­ca­noes. Here, the mass bal­ances of the chim­ney struc­tures, as well as the tem­poral / spa­tial dis­tri­bu­tions of mud flows and their in­ter­ac­tion of geo­lo­gical, phys­ical and chem­ical pro­cesses are in the fo­cus of re­search. The eval­u­ations within the DFG pro­ject so far have shown that the data col­lec­tion and sampling would provide sig­ni­fic­ant new in­sights into the un­der­stand­ing of both mud vol­ca­noes.

Link to expedition page

Logo SO278