Research Drilling Gardingen Tertiary Trough

The next research drilling of the Leibniz Institute for Applied Geophysics will be realised in the Gardingen Tertiary Trough (Schleswig-Holstein) together with the two Universities in Mainz and Lüneburg and the Landesamt für Natur und Umwelt Schleswig-Holstein. Later, further working groups will be involved in this project also.

The Gardingen Tertiary Trough has developed as the rim syncline of the Oldensworth salt dome during its uplift history in Tertiary and Quaternary times. This rim syncline hosts the thickest and most complete Cenozoic sediment sequence in Germany. The core drilling aims at the recovery of a complete pollen containing succession of organogenetic beds of Quaternary interglacials, but also on the recovery of sediments deposited during glacial periods. The close vicinity of the location to the German North Sea coast will enable the identification of relative sea level changes above the Holocene level. Characteristics of this location are that all stratigraphic units can be found in superposition and the existence of material that is datable (peat, windborne sand) for geochronological and palaeomagnetic studies. Prerequisite for such a succession is a deep basin that is continuously subsiding. Because in North Europe no deep lakes are known that exist throughout Quaternary, such basins can only be found in connection with rim synclines of the salt domes. For the Gardingen Tertiary Trough the largest subsidence rates of the entire North German Basin were observed, that is Base Quaternary in 500 m depth and a mean subsidence rate of 0.2 mm/a related to the depocenter.