« Exploring paleo-hydrology and its impact on sedimentary dynamic processes in the South China Sea » / MD 215
Funding
IFREMER
Project leader
Mission leaders
C. COLIN (GEOPS, France), Z. LIU (Tongji University, China) and A. Tien-Shun LIN (National Central University, Taiwan),
On-board scientific team
Thirty-five researchers and students from France (GEOPS, LSCE, IFREMER, and LOG laboratories), China (Key State Laboratory of Marine Geology, Tongji University) and Taiwan (Department of Earth Sciences du National Central University, National Sun Yat-sen University, Institute of Oceanography of the National Taiwan University).
The MD215 HYDROSED oceanographic campaign, conducted on board the Marion Dufresne, has allowed us to collect long marine sediment cores at sea water samples in the northern part of the South China Sea. The main scientific objective of the mission is to reconstruct the past hydrology of intermediate and deep water masses and also the climate of South East Asia and thus to estimate the impact on the dynamics of sediment transport to the ocean floor and earth-sea transfers.
The samples collected during the HYDROSED oceanographic campaign will allow us to:
1- Better constrain the origins and past variations of the intermediate and deep water masses in the northern part of the South China Sea and existing relationships with glacio-eustatic changes, the evolution of global thermohaline circulation (the Great Conveyor Belt) and regional climatic modifications;
2- Reconstruct past variability in the south-east Asian climate (the East Asian monsoon and the ENSO system) at a very high temporal resolution and to identify the potential impacts on deep sedimentation in the northern part of the South China Sea;
3- Reconstruct the past dynamics of sediment transfer from the continent (Taiwanese rivers) to the northern part of the South China Sea using a “source to sink” approach and to identify the climatic controls (paleo-typhoons, paleo-monsoons and changes in sea level);
4- Develop and/or improve geochemical tracers used for paleooceanographic reconstructions and increase our understanding of the distribution of neodymium isotopes *Nd) and concentrations of rare earth elements (REE) in a marginal sea that is greatly influenced by enormous discharges of freshwater and sediments from several Asiatic rivers.
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