The interplay of Malm carbonate permeability, gravity-driven groundwater ow, and paleoclimate – implications for the geothermal eld and potential in the Molasse Basin (Southern Germany), a foreland- basin play Tom Vincent Schintgen (
[email protected] ) Leibniz-Institut fur Angewandte Geophysik https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0172-4452 Inga Sigrun Moeck Georg-August-Universität Göttingen, Geowissenschaftliches Zentrum, Goldschmidtstraße 3 37077 Göttingen, Germany Research Keywords: Würm glaciation, permafrost, North Alpine Foreland Basin, Molasse Basin, Upper Jurassic, Malm, carbonate aquifer, coupled heat and uid ow, gravity-driven groundwater ow, geothermal plays Posted Date: March 31st, 2021 DOI: https://doi.org/10.21203/rs.3.rs-368780/v1 License: This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. Read Full License Page 1/54 Abstract The Molasse Basin in Southern Germany is part of the North Alpine Foreland Basin and hosts the largest accumulation of deep geothermal production elds in Central Europe. Despite the vast development of geothermal energy utilization projects especially in the Munich metropolitan region, the evolution of and control factors on the natural geothermal eld are still debated. Especially seismic and deep well data from extensive oil and gas exploration in the Molasse Basin led to conceptual hydrogeological and thermal-hydraulic models. Corrected borehole-temperature data helped to constrain subsurface temperatures by geostatistical interpolation and facilitated the set-up of 3D temperature models. However, within the geothermally used Upper Jurassic (Malm) carbonate aquifer, temperature anomalies such as the Wasserburg Trough anomaly to the east of Munich and their underlying physical processes are yet poorly understood. From other foreland basins like the Alberta Basin in Western Canada, it is known that climate during the last ice age has a considerable effect even on subsurface temperatures up to two kilometres depth.