TDI-Brooks, working on behalf of GeoPartners, has completed seep data acquisition, processing, interpretation and data management services (multibeam and coring) for the Suriname Seabed Piston Coring Project.
TDI-Brooks provided multibeam acquisition services using the research vessel Gyre to acquire approximately 45,000 square kilometres of seafloor multibeam data in the survey area as well as 60 SGE cores and seven heat flow samples.
This project consisted of two phases; geophysical and geochemical, both using Gyre and her crew.
The first phase was the geophysical leg which took place July thru October. During this phase, TDI-Brooks performed multibeam echosounder (MBES), backscatter and plume detection of 45,019.7 square kilometres.
The second phase took place October thru November and consisted of geochemical MBES backscatter, plume detection, sub-bottom profiler acquisition. A chirp sub-bottom profiler line was acquired over each core site.
Several possible hydrocarbon discoveries were also made during both phases.
Gyre is outfitted with a full seep hunting kit including a newly installed hull-mounted MBES kit and a sub-bottom profiler with transducer array. The vessel has geotechnical and geochemical coring, heat flow, CPT and other sampling capabilities.
Geochemical analyses and interpretation services will be performed at TDI-Brooks chemistry and geotechnical laboratories in College Station, Texas. They will perform geochemical screening analyses of geochemical cores for interstitial carbon gases (C1-C5 hydrocarbons and CO2), total scanning fluorescence (TSF) and C15+Gas Chromatography.
Cores with seepage hits will further be analysed for selected stable carbon gas isotopes and aliphatic/aromatic biological markers.