Courtesy of Arnold Horner 2006.
Ireland’s offshore ‘territory’ covers an area that is about ten times the size of its landmass. This vast area has only begun to be systematically explored in recent decades, a major stimulus for investigation being the expectation that exploitable oil and gas reserves can be located.
Over the last fifteen years or so, large-scale carbonate build-ups have been recognized in the north-east Atlantic . These features resemble the coral reefs associated with warm-water tropical regions, but here they are found, as concentric reef-like structures up to 1 km across and 250 metres in height, in cold water.
‘Carbonate mounds are very likely to contain a geochemical and biological record of deep-sea environmental change induced by paleoclimatic variations over tens of thousands of years. They are also a significant sink for excess carbon dioxide and their growth is potentially important in regulating climate change’. [From an article by P.W. Readman, B.M. O’Reilly and P. Shannon, pp.41-44 in M.A. Parkes (ed) Natural and Cultural Landscapes - the geological foundation (2004)].