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SEISMO-ACOUSTICS TO SEARCH FOR OFFSHORE SAND

Gabriel Ion, Adrian Popa, Florin Duțu, Mihai Simionescu

Abstract

The coastal retreat in touristic areas concerns many sectors along the Romanian Black Sea shore; it usually requires programmes for beach nourishment, and consequently, large amounts of proper sand are necessary to be available for such activities. In order to minimize the effort for searching offshore sand, we conducted seismo-acoustics researches and some other archived data have been used during these researches, both for planning the sea works and during the integrated interpretation of the data. The results of these researches provide also a lot of valuable information regarding the palaeogeographic circumstances during the processes of deposition and transport of the sediments on the continental platform. For making the results of such researches to be economical feasible for beach nourishment activities, sand accumulations have not be deeper than 40 m waters; beyond 40m water depths the dredging activities could be too far from the Romanian littoral and the overall cost for the offshore sand exploitation could be prohibitive. According to the above-mentioned general objectives, we designed to use a combination of seismo-acoustics methods: sub-bottom profiling, multibeam bathymetry and side scan sonar. These methods offer very detailed information regarding the bottom morphology of the sea floor, as well as the internal structure of the modern and young sediments for a depth of about 5-20 m below the sea bottom. We searched for specific features as palaeobeaches, coastal dunes, sand bars, etc., that usually host large amounts of sand. A network of W-E oriented profiles has been designed, along of which we conducted the seismo-acoustic surveying. These methods, employed in a complementary manner, were able to provide very valuable information based on which we produced maps suggesting the most probable areas for sand accumulations on the Romanian continental platform, located in waters with less than 40m depth.

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DOI resolver: doi.org/10.5593/sgem2020/1.2/s05.080

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