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

Description: The Western Antarctic Peninsula is an exceptionally climate-sensitive area and investigations into its environmental response to recent and past climate changes may support our understanding of the complex interactions in the ice-ocean-atmosphere system. Organic geochemical and micropaleontological analyses of a 210Pb-dated sediment core from the Bransfield Strait (located between the Antarctic Peninsula and the South Shetland Islands) reveal highly variable sea ice conditions over the past 200 years and increased phytoplankton productivity since the 1930s. Concentrations of biomarker lipids (highly branched isoprenoids (IPSO25), phytosterols) and diatom-based sea ice estimates are compared to satellite data and further environmental information derived from Antarctic Peninsula ice cores extending back in time beyond instrumental records. Fluctuations in the sedimentary abundance of the sea ice biomarker IPSO25 (Belt et al., 2016) and sea ice-associated diatom assemblages seem to be linked to changes in atmospheric (ENSO, SAM) and oceanic circulation patterns. Interestingly, both IPSO25- and diatom-based sea ice reconstructions for the spring and winter season, respectively, do not reflect the overall warming trend and sea ice decline observed in the study area over past decades (e.g., Stammerjohn et al., 2008). This observation may highlight the need for an improved understanding and more reasoned interpretations of proxy archives.