Back to the Canterbury Basin project.

Project Title: Global and Local Controls on Depositional Cyclicity: The Canterbury Basin, New Zealand
Principal Investigators: Craig Fulthorpe, Paul Mann, and Cliff Frohlich
Funded by: National Science Foundation

Canterbury Basin High-Resolution MCS Cruise Reports

Thursday, 27 January 2000
With only one full day of acquisition remaining, the cruise has continued to go well and we have exceeded our goals for data acquisition by about 20%. By the end of the cruise we should have over 3000 km of high-resolution, 2-D, multichannel seismic data. Equipment problems have been few and we have lost only about 6 hours to bad weather. The data highlight the complex history of the shelf and slope in the Canterbury Basin. Along-slope currents, modulated by sea-level change, have produced a succession of distinctive, possibly unique, mounded seismic geometries, inferred to represent sediment drifts. It was, in large part, this succession of drifts that built the continental shelf seaward during the Neogene. Everyone is in good spirits and looking forward to getting back to Austin for some warm weather, the New Zealand "summer" having proved to be a bit on the cool side.

Tuesday, 18 January 2000
We're approaching the halfway point of the cruise and everything has been going well. There have been few equipment problems and, most importantly given the shallow streamer towing depth of 2.5 m, the weather has been cooperative. Seas have been unusually calm with swell heights of < 1 m most of the time. We're hoping that this good fortune continues. The seismic grid covers an area of about 90x50km in the Canterbury Bight on the eastern margtin of the South Island of New Zealand. To date, we have acquired about half of the planned data: 28 profiles totalling 1500 km. Steffen and Jim are generating preliminary stacks as we go and data quality is excellent. The two 45/45 GI guns are providing over 1.5 seconds of penetration, sufficient to image the Oligocene limestones at the base of the prograding Neogene section. We have some particularly spectacular images of the buried sediment drifts that occur beneath the slope in the northern part of the survey area.