Plattform Platform	Reise-Nr. Cruise-No.	Zeitraum Period	Projekt Project	Arbeitsgebiet Working area
Maria S. Merian	MSM98-2(GPF20-3_073)	26.01.2021 - 22.02.2021		North Atlantic Ocean North Sea

Fahrtleiter Chief Scientist	Institut Institute	Auslaufhafen Port of departure	Einlaufhafen Port of return	Stationskarte Station map	Schiffsroute Trackchart
Schneider von Deimling Jens	Institut fur Geophysik der Universitat Kiel	Emden	Emden

Ziel der Reise / Objectives of Cruise:

MSM98-2: We departed port of EMDEN Tuesday, 26.01.2021 07:30 o'clock UTC and ran first tests of hydroacoustic equipment near Heligoland. Afterwards we steamed towards North, after 2.5 days we arrived in the first working area near the Tampen landslide area. Here we deployed the streamer seismic and our seismic source. We started with a softstart late afternoon and subsequently started our seismic surveying profile with the aim to connect the Tampen headwall area with Aegir ridge. On 29.01, the weather unexpectedly deteriorated with up to 6 m waves and wind gusts of 26 m/s and the streamer and airgun had to be recovered. We subsequently ran both, dedicated subbottom profiler and multibeam echosounder lines on Saturday 30.01 and Sunday 31.01 to identify suitable gravity corer location within the Aegir ridge trough and adjacent areas. We gathered 4 gravity cores on Monday 01.02 and Tuesday 02.02 with recoveries up to 5.5 m of fine grained material and refined our subbottom profiling during the nights. With decreasing swells we proceeded with our multichannel airgun seismics to correlate the landward side into the Aegir ridge. We faced major technical problems Wednesday 03.02 morning and abandoned the survey 10:22 UTC. Around 14:00 UTC we re-deployed the repaired streamer but two hours later the wind increased again to 20 m/s and we decided to abandon the survey and adjusted our survey directions to run all lines with the direction of the sea at day and reserved time to look for gravity corer positions during night in opposite direction. Here, three gravity cores with up to 7.3 m recovery were conducted on Friday 05.02 northwest of the ridge axis in a basin on a morphological high. We found at least two turbidites in one of the cores. On Friday night we continued with our seismic surveying, re-deployed and soft started on Saturday 06.02 17 o'clock UTC and finished our program at Aegir ridge Sunday 07.02 8 o'clock UTC. In the night, we steamed upslope and deployed our streamer again to refine the previously found Tampen slide pinchout area likely caused by a morphological high at depth of unknown origin. We continued seismic surveying here until Wednesday 10.02 05:00 o'clock UTC in the morning under fairly calm weather conditions for the first time during this cruise. After sailing a subsequent roll calibration for the deep water multibeam echosounder in 1500 m water depth we started steaming back up the continental shelve towards our second research area in the German Bight. After steaming two days we reached the working area being located between the island Sylt and Heligoland on Friday 12.02 and deployed and soft started the streamer seismic at 9:55 UTC together with a Micro GI airgun operated with only 130 bar. The new PARASOUND system on board was fine tuned to optimally image the palaeo landscape in parallel, the seismo-acoustic survey ran throughout until Monday 12:00 UTC without any technical problems. We only interrupted the survey for airgun maintenance reasons, and continued the survey until it was finished 19.02 09:30 o'clock UTC. Subsequently we installed our NORBIT multibeam echosounder in the moonpool of R/V MERIAN. Thus, first we had to run eights to calibrate our Applanix inertial navigation system at on 10.02 13:30 UTC by sailing ?fast eights' for one hour. Subsequently we ran densely spaced survey lines to cover a part of the previous seismic working area on 20.02 until noon time. Then we took four van-Veen grab samples to groundtruth the habitat mapping survey. We left the working area in the evening and sailed to the site 22 nm northwest of Heligoland to calibrate our own multibeam at the ?wreck' calibration site starting 22 o'clock.. On Sunday 21.02 14 o'clock UTC we stopped the multifrequency multibeam echosounder surveying and recovered our device from the moonpool. Parasound and EM712 was continued until 21:00 o'clock, we then stopped the scientific program and start

Messungen / Measurements