Seismic investigations offshore South-East Greenland

Abstract

A high-resolution, shallow-seismic survey off the SouthEast Greenland coast was carried out during August and September 1997 aboard the R/V Dana of the Danish Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries. This seismic survey supports two large ongoing regional research projects. The Danish Lithosphere Centre (DLC) is involved in a number of investigations to understand the tectonic evolution of the North Atlantic region since the early Tertiary, and a consortium of scientists from the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland (GEUS) and the Free University of Amsterdam (VU) are engaged in palaeo-oceanographic studies of climate change since the Neogene. The survey was thus a cooperative venture where ship time was shared between the participating research institutes. This report focuses on the DLC component of the cruise, which primarily involved the acquisition of site-survey data to be used in the planning and execution of drilling operations scheduled for 1998. These drilling operations are aimed at understanding the voluminous volcanic activity that accompanied continental rifting and the formation of the South-East Greenland margin. The GEUS/VU component of the cruise is summarised elsewhere in this volume (Kuijpers et al. 1998, this volume).