Resumen de Clues on Antarctic and Arctic Deep-Water Circulation and Seafloor Processes from Multibeam Mapping and Subbottom Profiling
Martin Jakobsson, Mathew O'Regan, J.B. Anderson, Benjamin Hell, Göran Björk, SO090 Shipboard Scientific Party
The development of the multibeam sonar was one of the major single breakthroughs in expanding our knowledge concerning the shape of the deep-sea floor and its interaction with ocean circulation and bottom processes. However, only a fraction of the World Ocean has been multibeam mapped. The bathymetry of the ice covered Arctic and Antarctic waters, for example, are still less known that the topography of several planets in our solar system. In 2007, Swedish ice breaker Oden was equipped with a deep-water multibeam system and an integrated chirp sonar subbottom profiler. Since this system was installed, Oden has carried out three major expeditions to the central Arctic Ocean and three to West Antarctica as well as shorter mapping missions in area soff Svalbard and eastern Greenland. The multibeam and chirp sonar were operated continuously during all these expeditions and mapped several previously unexplored deep-sea areas. In addition, we have used the system’scapability of logging the acoustic signal of the water column. Here we show multibeam swath bathymetric imagesand chirp sonar profiles from these expeditions providing insights into processes forming the seafloor morphology and the interaction between deep-sea currents and the seafloor.
