Climate Archives in Coastal Waters of Southern Africa - Cruise No. M123 - February 03 - February 27, 2016 - Walvis Bay (Namibia) - Cape Town (Rep. of South Africa) (English)

This research cruise M123 was directly connected to the collaborative research project RAiN (Regional Archives for Integrated iNvestigations) which is funded by the Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) in the framework of the SPACES program (Science Partnerships for the Assessment of Complex Earth System Processes). The overreaching goal of this project is to expand the current state of knowledge on the drivers and dynamics of South African Late Quaternary climate change by directly comparing marine and terrestrial proxy-records. Whereas sufficient sample material for these analyses was retrieved from the western South African coast during former expeditions, suitable marine sediment cores with high resolution deposits were not available from the south and east coast of southern Africa until now. This was, in part, due to patchy records affected by the regional style of dominant sedimentation regimes along these shores, which are influenced primarily by the strong south-westward flowing Agulhas contour current which causes erosion and sediment redistribution processes rather than accumulation and preservation. As we suspected and now proved true, based on detailed information on surface sediment characteristics and recent geomorphological studies of the shelf and continental slope areas, both provided by the South African co-proponents and partners, we could find the smallscale Holocene sediment bodies with sufficient thickness and were able to retrieve long sediment cores in front of all major rivers along the coast of southern Africa up to the Limpopo River. Depending on sediment grain size and texture, sea floor samples were taken with gravity corer, vibrocorer, box corer and multicorer. Surface samples and sediment cores could be retrieved at 25 sites from water depth between 32 m and 3.059 m, with a total recovery length ofmore than 107 m. For the purpose of identifying the best locations for coring, the ships acoustic systems were used along more than 900 nm of profile lines. In addition to the sediment work, at six sites planktonic foraminifera could be sampled using a multinet. Beside the scientific goals of this expedition, a strong focus was placed on the training of young scientists and advanced students from Germany and South Africa.