Thank you very much Dr. Emmermann, thank you very much. We are always overwhelmed by the tremendous scope of your illustration, and also you are quite punctual, and I appreciate that.
So we would like to take several questions from the floor, and also for all the presentations this morning, using the time now, we would like to have the questions.
Questions：
Questioner： In the proposed Lake Titicaca drilling that you showed, the seismic section that is on the diagram shows a sediment section of 20 to 30 meters. Are you considering using other technologies like piston coring to achieve those science objectives there ?
Dr. Emmermann：
Yeah, we have very different thicknesses of the sediments. The thickness in some parts of the lake is up to 300 meters, so we have done in co-operation and co-financed by ODP, in co-operation with ODP, the ODP engineer, a feasibility study for drilling on large lakes. So we have a drilling feasibility study available which tells us which technique we should use best for various lakes of different sizes, and this feasibility study which is available to both communities also will allow specific drilling strategies maybe for off-shore drilling in shallow waters. We think that can also use some of the recommendations which were made in this study for the New Jersey Coastal Plain Transect on-shore and off-shore in waters where the Joides Resolution cannot drill. So we have a plan and it still has to be decided where exactly the boreholes should be, and then we exactly know according to the study which technology we should apply best.
Chairperson： Any other questions from the floor ?
Questioner：
May I ask two factual questions please, quite unrelated to one another ?
One relates to the KTB I think. Why should the brittle-ductile transition be a high-conductivity layer ? And my second question relates to the Lake Baikal drill. You say the core goes back to 15 million years and 600 meters, so the average sedimentation rate there is only a very small fraction of a millimeter per year. What is the ambition, the realistic ambition in relation to continuity and resolution of the climate record in that bore ?
Dr. Emmermann：
OK, the answer to the first question. I didn't mention that the basement section which we drilled was highly fractured and one of the surprising result was that we actually encountered a crust which was stacked. We have a pile of crustal pieces, so we actually had a tripling of the continental crust in that area during the Mesozoic time in combination with the folding of the Alps. That is very clear from all data that the Mesozoic brittle-ductile zone - you can easily see it in the drill cores - was encountered. And what we see is that this zone acts as a de-coupling layer where the upper crust is decoupled from the lower part of the crust and the upper crust which behaves brittle is just stacked and decoupled from this crust. We think the same happens today, so we believe that the brittle-ductile transition is a first-order boundary in the rheologic behavior of the crust, and we are convinced also from other DEKORP data, that the present-day upper crust is not connected directly to the present-day lower crust, so there might be an overthrust of several hundreds of kilometers. And we believe that this phenomenon - we see it in the fault zone - might be related with the precipitation of graphite. That's one point. So we leave this as a very important phenomenon and a very new idea that the upper continental crust might not be directly related to the underlying lower crust. So we have to come up with very new models about the structure of the continental crust.
