Abstract
The chapter presents results of five Polish expeditions which realised an extensive programme of wide-angle refraction experiments in the northern Antarctic Peninsula region in the period of 1979–2007. The main achievement was the interpretation of materials collected along 20 deep seismic sounding profiles located along western part of the Antarctic Peninsula. Additionally, few shallow profiles in the area of Deception Island and the net of 10 reflection profiles from the Bransfield Strait and Drake Passage, and 3D experiment in the Admiralty Bay (King George Island) were carried out. Crustal velocity models extending across the Antarctic continental shelf between Adelaide Island and Bransfield Strait show typical continental crustal structure, with crustal thicknesses of 36–42 km near the coast, decreasing to 25–28 km beneath the outer continental shelf. Farther north, in the Bransfield Strait region, the models describe a crustal structure with the Moho dipping southeastward from a depth of 10 km beneath the South Shetland Trench to 40 km under the northern tip of the Antarctic Peninsula. Beneath the trough of the Bransfield Strait, the presence of a high-velocity body, with compressional-wave velocities exceeding 7.0 km/s, was detected at a depth range of 6–32 km.
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Acknowledgments
The Polish Antarctic Expeditions were helped by numerous Antarctic stations: Argentinian (Almirante Brown, Esperanca and Primavera); Brasilian (Comendante Ferraz); British (Rothera,R); Chilean (O’Higgins and Arturo Prat); and Spanish (Livingston Island). The land teams also used inactive stations: Half Moon, Melchior (Agentinian); Hope Bay, Damoy (A), Danco (O), Deception (B), Faraday (F), Horse Shoe (Y), Admiralty Bay (G) (British). The Expeditions collaborated closely with the Polish Arctowski Antarctic Station on King George Island. The members of the Expeditions are grateful to all persons and organisations responsible for the Antarctic stations they used. The cooperation and assistance of Polish scientists, technicians and captains and the crews of the hydrographic research ship ORP “Kopernik”, oceanic tugs M/S “Jantar” and D/E “Neptunia”, and M/V “Polar Pioneer”, during the experiments are gratefully acknowledged. The first four expeditions were led by Aleksaner Guterch. Members of five Polish Antarctic Expeditions, included many people working at the Institute of Geophysics PAS: Zbigniew Czerwiński, Wojciech Czuba, Edward Gaczyński, Zbigniew Gajewski, Marek Górski, Aleksander Guterch, Tomasz Janik, Włodzimierz Kowalewski, Jerzy Krajczyński, Marek Kubicki, Mariusz Majdański, Michał Malinowski, Jan Pajchel, Robert Pietrasiak, Edward Perchuć, Stanisław Rudowski, Kazimierz Skowroński, and Maciej Zalewski.
We are indebted to Geofizyka Toruń S.A. for providing instrumentation and staff support during our expedition operation.
During the Antarctic summer of 1990/91, a detailed deep seismic refraction survey was undertaken in the Bransfield Strait using sensitive ocean bottom-seismic stations in co-operation with the Hokkaido University in Sapporo.
For map preparation and coordinate calculations we used GMT software (Wessel and Smith 1998).
We greatly appreciate the constructive and helpful review by Wolfram Geissler.
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Janik, T., Grad, M., Guterch, A. (2014). Five Polish Seismic Expeditions to the West Antarctica (1979–2007). In: Bialik, R., Majdański, M., Moskalik, M. (eds) Achievements, History and Challenges in Geophysics. GeoPlanet: Earth and Planetary Sciences. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-07599-0_8
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