Research project
NERC: Gulf of Corinth IODP Expedition 381 Inorganic Geochemistry
- Start date: 1 March 2018
- End date: 28 February 2019
- Funder: Natural Environment Research Council (NERC)
- Primary investigator: 01004873
This project is being conducted by Carol Mahoney (UK-IODP funded Postdoc) under supervision of Christian März. The Gulf of Corinth (Greece) is one of the world’s most active rift basins, and it is connected to the Mediterranean only via a shallow sill, and it has therefore experienced intense environmental changes induced by glacial-interglacial sea level changes over the last 100,000s of years. Expedition 381 of the International Ocean Discovery Program (IODP) drilled several kilometres of high-quality sediment cores in the Gulf of Corinth in summer 2017, and Carol is a member of a hugely diverse scientific party that tries to understand various aspects of how the basin and its sedimentary infill formed. Specifically, Carol will focus on the geochemical signals archived in the sediments as the Gulf of Corinth shifted from a well-connected marine stage to a restricted (lake?) stage, with a focus on the reconstruction of depositional environment and the cycling of iron, sulphur, carbon and phosphorus in the sediments.