How Offshore Groundwater Shapes the Seafloor

The MARCAN project, launched last January, is working to fill a gap in our knowledge of how freshwater flowing underground shapes and alters the continental margins.MARCAN, a 5-year European Research Council–funded project that launched in January 2017, addresses the role of offshore groundwater in the formation of submarine landforms at continental margins. Driven by the principle that topographically driven meteoric groundwater is an important geomorphic agent, MARCAN’s multiscale approach involves characterizing offshore groundwater systems in unprecedented detail and placing these systems into the framework of advanced continental margin geomorphic evolution models.

The project results are expected to guide future investigations of offshore groundwater systems, add a new dimension to continental margin research, and better reveal some of the most widespread and significant landforms on Earth. The MARCAN project’s direct mapping of offshore aquifers could be applied to improving offshore groundwater assessment techniques. Some possible applications of these assessments include tapping offshore freshwater as a source of drinking water, guiding offshore carbon dioxide sequestration efforts, and exploring for mineral resources and petroleum.