PS115.1 Weekly Report No. 4 | 27.08. – 02.09.2018
Last work in the northeastern Greenland Sea in the final week of the cruise
[03. September 2018]
After returning to the part of the Wandel Sea just off the coast of Kronprins Christian Land, the northeasternmost point of Greenland, station work started including heat flow measurements and sediment sampling (box corer and gravity corer).
Additional helicopter flights were planned to proceed with on land sampling in the permitted area around 120 km away, unfortunately these plans had to be aborted because of heavy fog that only cleared for a brief period of time. Said time window was too short to cover the distance of 120 km in a helicopter and a Narwhale protection area made it impossible to shorten the necessary flight distance by moving the ship closer to the shore. For that reason geological sampling was postponed to the next good weather window and we switched over to reflections seismic measurements.
After deploying 3000 m of Streamer and maintenance work on our air guns we started acquisition of reflection seismic profiles in the Danmarkshavn Basin. We hope these perpendicularly orientated profiles of the basin with its up to 15 km of sediment thickness will not just enable us to reconstruct the opening of the North Atlantic but also to determine the relationship of the northeast Greenland shelf to the Barents shelf.
As a consequence of steady technology and ice observation helicopter flights, reflection seismic measurements were continuous over the last week of the cruise, undisturbed of ice fields with coverage of 7/10 that could be found to our west and east. Solely the dragged magnetometer could not be used part of the time, since the ice bared too great a danger for it. The mission to retrieve a GPS-Station from the TU Dresden and Collection of more Samples on land was given up, due to the absence of suitable weather for flying.
Even still, we are very contempt with the outturn of the cruise and met more than just our expectations thanks to lucky ice conditions and the great motivation and work from everyone.
Our special Thanks go out to Captain Wunderlich and his crew not just for the competent collaboration but also their friendly support that essentially contributed to the success of the cruise and made it a very pleasant experience for all.
PS115.1 in a nutshell:
2523 km reflection seismic profiles, of which 2250 km were collected with a 3km long streamer up to 84°20’N
A 100 km refraction seismic profile using 9 ocean bottom seismometers
1582 km of magnetic profiles
Continuous gravimetrical and bathymetrical data acquisition
7 heat flow measurement stations
21 geological sampling sites were chosen, with all together one dredge (around 200 kg of sample), 16 gravity cores (total core length 65 m), 12 box corer and 6 multi-corer stations
18 onshore sampling sites, of which 7 were for hard rock samples with a weight of approximately 250 kg
Complete execution of the co-user’s science program on board
After one day of transit, the cruise PS115.1 will end in Longyearbyen/Svalbard on Monday morning.
One last time, best of wishes from Polarstern
On behalf of all on board
Volkmar Damm
Position, 76°7’N, 5°41‘W
Contact
Science
Dr. Volkmar Damm
+49-(0)511-643-3226
Volkmar.Damm@bgr.de
Scientific Coordination
Rainer Knust
+49(471)4831-1709
Rainer Knust
Assistant
Sanne Bochert
+49(471)4831-1859
Sanne Bochert
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