EUROMARGINS

The understanding of the processes that have shaped the passive continental margin system will require broadly based inter-disciplinary studies, yet no one country within Europe currently has access to all the human resources and large-scale facilities that will be needed to pursue this objective. The new EUROCORES programme, EUROMARGINS, will provide the framework for promoting innovative studies that are focused on the imaging, monitoring, reconstruction and modelling of the physical and chemical processes that occur in the passive margin system. In particular, EUROMARGINS will seek to encourage the development of both new technologies and conceptual models for passive margin evolution with the expressed aim of advancing, in a major way, integrated research into the mechanisms that are responsible for continental break-up and the formation of the world’s ocean basins and their margins. The pooling of human resources, the training of a new generation of geoscientists, and the optimal sharing of national observational platforms (e.g. ships), analytical and modelling facilities as well as the development of new linkages that break down traditional discipline boundaries are considered important "value-added" ingredients of the EUROMARGINS programme.