Begin of the Antartic Season

By sending out echosounds, the acquired information goes well beyond receiving a depth determination at the ship’s actual position. The Hydrosweep system brings to life a high-resolution picture of a hidden world at the sea floor: huge dunes at the bottom of the English Channel, steep incised canyons off the coast of Portugal and submarine landslides on the slopes of the Canary Islands. The sediment echosounding system Parasound allows for a better insight into the deposits at the bottom of the ocean. Geometrical patterns of lateral deposits are suddenly in disorder, caused by landslides. The trained geologist combines the gathered information into a tale from the past: who would think that hundreds of thousands of years ago, a giant cataract plunged from the shallow North Sea shelf into the deeps of the English Channel? The remnants of this event can still be traced in the sediment. Next to their watches, the students were busy with literature research, interpretation, discussion and putting their findings into a larger geological context. One example is displayed in Figure 2: Multibeam echosounding data of marine dunes in the Strait of Dover. The view is from the English coast towards France. The asymmetric shape that dunes develop along the current is clearly visible. During the displayed record, we crossed a reversion line from south-westwards to north-east directed mean currents.