Publication Date:
2018-08-10
Description:
The MARUM-MeBo (abbreviation for Meeresboden-Bohrgerät, the German expression for seafloor drill rig) is
a robotic drilling system that is developed since 2004 at the MARUM Center for Marine Environmental
Sciences at the University of Bremen in close cooperation with Bauer Maschinen GmbH and other industry
partners. The MARUM-MeBo drill rigs can be deployed from multipurpose research vessel like, RV MARIA
S. MERIAN, RV METEOR, RV SONNE and RV POLARSTERN and are used for getting long cores both in
soft sediments as well as hard rocks in the deep sea.
The first generation drill rig, the MARUM-MeBo70 is dedicated for drilling depths of more than 70 m
(Freudenthal and Wefer, 2013). Between 2005 and 2017 it was deployed on 18 research expeditions and
drilled more than. 3 km into different types of lithologies including carbonate and crystalline rocks, gas
hydrates, sands and gravel, glacial till and hemipelagic mud with an average recovery rate of 67 %.
In February and March 2017 the MeBo70 was used on the West Antarctic continental shelf in the Amundsen
Sea Embayment for the first time. The goal of the deployment on RV Polarstern expedition PS104 was to
recover a series of sediment cores from different ages that will provide material for investigating the
glaciation history of this area known as the most dynamic drainage area of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet. In
this presentation we will focus on the operational experiences of this first deployment of a multi-barrel sea
floor drill rig on the Antarctic continental shelf.
References: Freudenthal, T and Wefer, G (2013) Drilling cores on the sea floor with the remote-controlled
sea floor drilling rig MeBo. Geoscientific Instrumentation, Methods and Data Systems, 2(2). 329-337.
doi:10.5194/gi-2-329-2013
Repository Name:
EPIC Alfred Wegener Institut
Type:
Conference
,
notRev
Format:
application/pdf
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