European Margin Sediment Dynamics

Abstract

Observing the ocean floor and subsurface has been a challenge for the last three decades and will remain so for the next century. Like the space odyssey it brings to our eyes an unexpected and sometimes virgin world. Tremendous progress in technology has improved both the accuracy and speed of data acquisition. In particular, acoustic imagery mosaics provided by side‐scan sonar data offer a view of the ocean floor. This revolution in our vision and knowledge of the ocean floor is equivalent to the one that followed the first aerial photographs of the emerged Earth in the 1940s, or the satellite photographs of the late 1970s. A new, complex world appears, one that can be appreciated at different scales.