Hiske Fink

Marine Sedimentologie (AG Prof. Dr. Dierk Hebbeln)

PhD-topic

'The development of cold-water coral ecosystems in the Mediterranean Sea'

Cold-water corals constitute unique and widely distributed ecosystems along the European continental margin. During the past two decades, it has been discovered that they occur from northern Norway, along the Irish margin, to the Gulf of Cádiz and off Mauritania as well as on several areas in the Mediterranean Sea.
For long time, only reef-forming cold-water corals of Pleistocene age were known from the Mediterranean Sea and it was assumed that their occurrence was mainly restricted to glacial periods. In 2000, for the first time, living colonies of Lophelia pertusa (cold-water coral) were discovered in a water depth of 300-1,100 m on a gently dipping shelf off Apulia at Santa Maria di Leuca (Ionian Sea).

An expedition with the RV METEOR (M70-1) to the Mediterranean Sea in 2006 was conducted with the aim to broaden the knowledge about the distribution of living cold-water corals and to investigate the geobiology of these ecosystems. Besides observing thriving cold-water coral ecosystems in several parts of the central Mediterranean, also long-term sedimentary records containing coral fragments have been obtained.

The collected sample material offers the possibility to reconstruct the long-term development of cold-water coral ecosystems in the Mediterranean Sea and will be investigated during this PhD project. The main question is which forcing factors triggered the development of these ecosystems, concerning climatic conditions and hydrodynamic settings? To answer these questions, it is planed to do several geobiological analyses comprising e.g. (1) the measurement of stable oxygen isotopes on benthic and planktonic foraminifera as well as (2) age determinations (AMS 14C dating) on planktonic foraminifera and cold-water coral fragments to reconstruct the climatic conditions; (3) grain size analyses and taxonomic analyses of the benthic foraminifera assemblages to reconstruct the hydrodynamic setting, and (4) taxonomic analyses of the cold-water coral assemblage and their associated macro fauna.

thesis commitee

Name	Phone	Fax	e-mail
Hebbeln, Dierk	+49  421 218 - 65650	+49  421 218 - 65654
Westphal, Hildegard	+49  421 23800 - 21	+49  421 23800 - 30
Wienberg, Claudia	+49  421 218 - 65652	+49  421 218 - 9865652