ECORD Summer School 2012

"Submarine Landslides, Earthquakes and Tsunamis"

The major goal was to bring PhD students and young Postdocs in touch with IODP at an early stage of their career, inform them about the actual research within this international scientific program, and to prepare them for future participations in IODP expeditions. Such training will be achieved by taking the summer school participants on a “virtual ship” where they get familiarized with a wide spectrum of state-of-the-art analytical technologies and core description methods according to the high standards on IODP expeditions. Therefore the course was equally balanced, with half the time dedicated to lectures and discussions and the other half to laboratory exercises.

The ECORD Summer School on “Submarine Landslides, Earthquakes and Tsunamis” 2012 was held September 3-14, 2012 at the MARUM – Center for Marine Environmental Sciences, Bremen University, Germany. It has been organized by Prof. Dr. Dierk Hebbeln, Director of the Bremen International Graduate School for Marine Sciences „Global Change in the Marine Realm“ (GLOMAR), by Prof. Dr. Katrin Huhn, head of the group on Modelling Sedimentation Processes at the University of Bremen, by Prof. Dr. Michael Strasser, Assistant Professor for Sediment Dynamics at the ETH Zurich, and by Dr. Ursula Röhl, head of the IODP Bremen Core Repository (BCR). GLOMAR, MARUM and BCR jointly offered the unique training possibilities used for this summer school by providing laboratory facilities and by providing a seminar room equipped with 20 laptops (internet access, MatLab etc.). Additional funding to carry out the Summer School has been provided by the IGCP Working Group 585.

The two-week course combined lectures and interactive discussions on Submarine landslides, earthquakes and tsunamis with practical exercises, with the latter mainly using the facilities of the BCR. The scientific lectures and exercises have been confined mostly to the morning sessions, whereas the “virtual ship” related practicals mainly took part during the afternoon sessions.
In the morning sessions the program (see attachment) focused on lectures and discussions which were given and guided by leading scientists from the field (see below). These sessions have been grouped in the following sub-themes:
•Earthquakes and Tsunamis,
•Submarine Landslides, and
•Plate Boundary Dynamics and Earthquakes
After lunch the participants got the opportunity to present their own research work and to discuss it with their fellow participants and with some of the summer school lectures, thereby enabling them to build on their own international networks. The afternoon sessions took advantage of the unique facilities of the Bremen IODP core repository and labs and aimed at introducing PhD students and young Postdocs to a full range of IODP related topics from general introduction to the program to compiling of IODP proposals and to get an insight into “shipboard” methodologies applied on the drilling vessels. The focus was on group-based practicals focusing on standard shipboard methodologies such as core description, physical properties, pore water extraction, and borehole logging as well as on more thematically focused approaches with respect to slope failure and sediment physical characterization.

The weekend between the first and the second week was partly used a field trip to visit coastal protection infrastructures and discuss the preparedness to potential offshore geohazards in the low-lying coastal areas along the North Sea coast line and gave the participants the possibility to explore the city of Bremen at the free Sunday.

 programme_ECORD_2012.pdf

 ECORD-2012-Plan.pdf

Lecturers

A total of 31 PhD students and young post-docs from several countries -
Australia, Belgium, Canada, France, Germany, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Switzerland, United Kingdom -
participated in the ECORD Summer School 2012.

Within the summer school, the participants were given the opportunity to present their own projects in 15-minutes talks.
Mr Gauvain Wiemer (University of Bremen) received the award for the best oral presentation.

Questionnaires collected at the end of the summer school recorded the overwhelming positive feedbacks from the participants. Some hints (more short breaks, more detailed personal introduction of participants, etc.) will be considered in the preparation of the Bremen ECORD Summer School 2013.

It is planned to address the three major topics of the IODP Initial Science Plan in a recurring three year cycle, thereby exploiting the unique facilities in Bremen where about 50 scientists work on the whole width of IODP-related topics. After the first full cycle comprising an “Earth History” topic in 2007 (ECORD Summer School on Paleoceanography), a “Deep Biosphere” topic in 2008 (ECORD Summer School on the Deep Subseafloor Biosphere), and a “Solid Earth Cycles and Geodynamics” topic in 2009 (ECORD Summer School on the Geodynamics of Mid-Ocean Ridges), and the second full cycle comprising an “Earth History” topic in 2010 (ECORD Summer School on the Dynamics of Past Climate Changes), a “Deep Biosphere” topic in 2011 (ECORD Summer School on Subseafloor Fluid Flow and Gas Hydrates), and a “Solid Earth Cycles and Geodynamics” topic this year (ECORD Summer School on the Submarine Landslides, Earthquakes and Tsunamis), we will start the third cycle in 2013. For the next year, the ECORD Summer School on Deep-Sea Sediments: From Stratigraphy to Age Models is already preliminary scheduled to take place in Bremen from September 9-21, 2013.