Published by the American Geophysical Union as part of the Lecture Notes on Coastal and Estuarine Studies Series, Volume 13.

During the late sixties, the marine scientific community was becoming increasingly aware of the necessity of conducting process-oriented research on specific "problem areas". It was assumed that the results of such detailed analyses would provide an explanatory framework for the descriptive data accumulating from the extensive surveys of the oceans at large that had dominated marine science up to that period. The physical, chemical and biological interaction between the ocean and the sediments was identified as one of the most important interdisciplinary problems at the 1969 meeting of the Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission. In the same year, a group of scientists from Kiel University—representing the five disciplines: physical, chemical, geological and biological oceanography as well as applied physics—combined forces and, in 1970, submitted a comprehensive proposal to the German Research Foundation (DFG: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft) under the title “Interaction Sea-Seabottom” (“Wechselwirkung Wasser-Meeresboden”). The professors G. Dietrich, G. Einsele, G. Hempel and E. Seibold were the chief initiators of this project. It addressed two themes:

• the relationship between water movement and sediment structure and,
• the interaction between the chemical regime and the organisms at the sediment surface.