Matches in UGent Biblio for { ?s ?p Corals have long been associated with warm and shallow water in tropical settings. Nevertheless an important group of corals thrives in deep and cold waters where they feed on plankton and suspended organic material in the water column. Cold-water corals have been observed along the entire NE Atlantic margin. In certain places these cold-water corals build important geological features on the seabed such as the kilometers-long Lophelia reef complexes, which have been mapped off Norway. However, the most spectacular coral build-ups are, without any doubt, mound structures which reach heights up to 300 meter and have diameters up to several kilometers. Hence, they represent some of the most impressive bioherms in the world. Clusters of such cold-water coral mounds can be found in the Porcupine Seabight and the Rockall Trough, west of Ireland but also more to the south in the Gulf of Cadiz, in the Alboran Sea and off the Mauritanian coast. In 2005, the IODP (Integrated Ocean Drilling Program) expedition 307 drilled for the first time a complete sequence through a cold-water coral mound (i.e. Challenger Mound, Porcupine Seabight) revealing the presence of cold-water corals from the top to the base of the mound. Hence, the corals are really the engineers for the build-up of these mound structures. Several generations of PhD theses, conducted over the last two decades, have already provided a broad overview of cold-water coral mound distribution, morphology, habitat mapping and contemporary constraints on mound build-up. The present thesis will zoom in on two distinct niches which, until now, remained largely unexplored: (1) the terrigenous fraction in a cold-water coral mound as a recorder of paleo-environmental conditions and (2) cold-water coral mounds as a natural laboratory to study early-diagenetic processes in cool-water carbonate bodies.. }
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- aggregation abstract "Corals have long been associated with warm and shallow water in tropical settings. Nevertheless an important group of corals thrives in deep and cold waters where they feed on plankton and suspended organic material in the water column. Cold-water corals have been observed along the entire NE Atlantic margin. In certain places these cold-water corals build important geological features on the seabed such as the kilometers-long Lophelia reef complexes, which have been mapped off Norway. However, the most spectacular coral build-ups are, without any doubt, mound structures which reach heights up to 300 meter and have diameters up to several kilometers. Hence, they represent some of the most impressive bioherms in the world. Clusters of such cold-water coral mounds can be found in the Porcupine Seabight and the Rockall Trough, west of Ireland but also more to the south in the Gulf of Cadiz, in the Alboran Sea and off the Mauritanian coast. In 2005, the IODP (Integrated Ocean Drilling Program) expedition 307 drilled for the first time a complete sequence through a cold-water coral mound (i.e. Challenger Mound, Porcupine Seabight) revealing the presence of cold-water corals from the top to the base of the mound. Hence, the corals are really the engineers for the build-up of these mound structures. Several generations of PhD theses, conducted over the last two decades, have already provided a broad overview of cold-water coral mound distribution, morphology, habitat mapping and contemporary constraints on mound build-up. The present thesis will zoom in on two distinct niches which, until now, remained largely unexplored: (1) the terrigenous fraction in a cold-water coral mound as a recorder of paleo-environmental conditions and (2) cold-water coral mounds as a natural laboratory to study early-diagenetic processes in cool-water carbonate bodies.".