In the cour­se of the en­vi­ron­men­tal re­or­ga­niza­t­i­on of the North Sea shelf sin­ce the Last Gla­ci­al Ma­xi­mum, the Elbe-Pa­laeo­val­ley (EPV) chan­ged its hy­dro­geo­lo­gi­cal cha­rac­ter from a gla­ci­al mel­twa­ter drai­na­ge sys­tem along the Scan­di­na­vi­an ice sheet (SIS) mar­gin into a sea in­let with va­rious ma­jor and re­gio­nal tri­bu­ta­ries, be­fo­re the EPV fi­nal­ly got drow­ned in the mo­dern  North Sea du­ring the post-gla­ci­al trans­gres­si­on. One tar­get of this pro­po­sal is to un­der­stand the hy­dro­geo­lo­gi­cal role and evo­lu­ti­on of a re­cent­ly dis­co­ve­r­ed tri­buta­ry sys­tem of the EPV, which drai­ned the ex­po­sed Dog­ger Bank area. Ba­sed on fin­dings from RV Heincke crui­se HE405 (2013) fo­cu­sing on the in­fill his­to­ry of the sou­thern EPV in the cour­se of the trans­gres­si­on, a se­cond tar­get is to in­ves­ti­ga­te the par­ti­al­ly spe­cu­la­ti­ve pa­thway of the nort­hern EPV and the un­der­ly­ing mor­pho­lo­gy. A third tar­get is to un­der­stand the in­fill pat­tern re­la­ted to lar­ge sca­le cir­cu­la­ti­on and pa­laeo-to­po­gra­phic cons­trains. For all tar­gets we will ob­tain data with seis­mic sur­veys and vi­bro­co­ring in Da­nish, Nor­we­gi­an, Ger­man and Dutch wa­ters. The re­sults will pro­vi­de new in­sights in the EPV as a re­gio­nal de­wa­te­ring sys­tem sin­ce the late Weich­se­li­an and in­crea­se our un­der­stan­ding about the role of tri­buta­ry sys­tems in for­ming the Me­so­li­thic Dog­ger­land land­scape in the pre­sent-day North Sea.                    

Lo­ca­ti­on of the stu­dy are­as in re­spect to the known po­si­ti­on of the Elbe-Pa­laeo­val­ley and the Dog­ger Bank. Ma­genta rectangles show the po­si­ti­on of the Dog­ger drai­na­ge chan­nel (north) and the Pa­laeo Ems (south). Exis­ting MCS and SES li­nes in the Ger­man Bight are also shown. The red over­view li­nes shall pro­vi­de a first base for the ex­act lo­ca­ti­on of a den­ser sur­vey line net­work.

 

Groups in­vol­ved:

• Department of Earth Science, University of Bergen, Norway (Prof. Haflidi Haflidason)
• Department of Geosciences and Natural Resource Management, University of Copenhagen, Denmark

Equip­ment:

• Highfrequency shallow water multichannel seismics
• Single channel seismic Boomer
• Echosounding systems
• Vibrocorer