CE14003 GATEWAYS II Survey

Possible deployment of vibrocoring equipment. Night time coring will only be envisaged if adverse weather conditions severely hamper core recovery during day time operations. Primarily, this application proposes to collect cores from and seismic imaging data of the sediments and landforms deposited in an important marginal zone of the last British Irish Ice Sheet (BIIS). The region features highly in models of ‘ice streaming’ within the last BIIS. The sites will be specifically chosen to ground truth data collected in 2009 during the Italian GLAMAR cruise (PI Dr Daniel Praeg, a co-applicant currently based at OGS, Trieste), and legacy data and core locations of the BGS (Dr Dayton Dove, BGS Edinburgh, is also a co-applicant). To achieve this, sediments will be collected from locations with high probabilities of allowing a new, robust and internationally importnant glacial stratigraphic framework to be developed for these areas. The data collected will form important components of tests for critical hypotheses regarding ice extents and ice stream formation. This proposal builds on the work already conducted in one of the proposed survey areas under the auspices of the Italian led GLAMAR mission and the PI’s INFOMAR funded RIDGES project (closed and reported on in Nov. 2010/Jan 2011 respectively). It also compliments all the work being done on the glacial history of the Irish western shallow shelf (including the PI’s INFOMAR funded EIMeR and RIDGES projects) and the intended investigation of the same issues by the NERC funded BRITICE-CHRONO project which actively supports this application (B-C Theme Leader (Marine Geology) Prof. Colm O’Cofaigh is a co-applicant). The cruise will also aim to collect MBES and UWTV groundtruthing samples for use within the Geological Survey’s seabed substrate characterisation research (led by Mr X. Monteys and Dr. Gill Scott, also NUIM) in collaboration with Dr Colm Lordan, MI Fisheries Science Services.