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2021 02 - R/V Heincke Cruise He569


03.02.2021 - 27.02.2021 : Bre­mer­ha­ven – Bre­mer­ha­ven

Chief Scientist: Dr. Hanno Keil

Chief Seismic: Dr. Bergmann

MTU Participants: Römer-Stange, Meyer, Valeeva

Project Partners: Dr. Daniel Hepp (MARUM); Prof. Dr. Katrine Juul-Andresen (Univ. Aarhus, Denmark)

Cruise Report, Weekly Reports, MCS Lines


Groups in­vol­ved

  • Working Group Marine Technology/Environmental Research, Department of Geoscience, Bremen University (GeoB AG Spiess (MTU))
  • Working Group Marine Ingenieurgeologie, MARUM Center for marine environmental sciences, Bremen University (GeoB AG Mörz)
  • Seislab, University of Aarhus, Denmark

Instrumentation

  • micro GI Gun 2 x 0.1 L (Generator-Injector; Sodera)
  • DuraSpark 400 (Fraunhofer IWES)
  • Teledyne Streamer 220 m, 96 channels, sinle hydrophone groups 
  • P-Cable swath seismic system (Aarhus)
  • Innomar SES System medium
  • Multibeam?
  • Vibrocorer (MARUM)


Funding for this cruise and related science is received through SEBAMO, the our joint research project with BSH, to gain a better understanding of geologic conditions in the German North Sea, with a focus on wind farm areas in the North Sea.


The repeated glacial-interglacial reshaping of the Quaternary landscape of the south-eastern North Sea resulted in a complex stratigraphy with large-scale to small-scale morphological structures. Intense commercial acoustic surveying during the last decades established a valuable data base of the Pleistocene facies in deeper strata, however, a good understanding of the upper ~100 m of the sediments is still lacking. Based on and extending findings from former cruises HE405 and HE463 the actual cruise He569 was carried out to address three major objectives: (1) to understand on a larger scale the interplay between Pleistocene glacial and interglacial periods in the south-eastern North Sea and related small scaled structural patterns, (2) to test the controversially discussed late Weichselian ice-dammed lake hypothesis in the context of the Elbe Paleovalley, and (3) to analyze the eastern Dogger Bank drainage systems and their relation to the Elbe Paleovalley. 

For this purpose a mixture of acoustic measurement systems were used throughout the cruise. 2Dmultichannel seismic data with the University of Bremen special high resolution shallow water equipment were acquired on a limited set of long overview transects spanning the German EEZ in total from south-west to north-east to address objective (1) in providing a regional overview and distribution of near surface Pleistocene sedimentation structures. Several shorter transects were inspected in North-South and east-west direction in the area of the southern ducks beak in the northern German and the adjacent south-eastern Danish EEZ to investigate the extension as well as internal structural variations of a ~20 m thick acoustic facies attributed to potentially consist of glaciolacustrine sediments. Here the emphasis was on SES 2000 subbottom profiler data, however, several 2D-multichannel seismic lines were also acquired to allow proper imaging and tracing of the base reflector of this unit. In total 4 vibrocores with a length of 5.5 m each were taken from the top of the unit and revealed very homogeneous and stiff clay sediments, a rather untypical sediment type for the south-eastern North Sea.