Material in this publication may be copied without restraint for library, abstract service, educational, or personal research purposes; however, this source should be appropriately acknowledged. The Belgica mound province belongs to the best documented carbonate mound provinces worldwide. Very high resolution seismic profiling, multibeam bathymetry, and side-scan sonar imaging have shed light on the stratigraphic, structural, and morphological setting. The mounds are rooting on a strongly erosive unconformity and are seated partly on an enigmatic sequence of sigmoidal units and partly on a semitransparent layer. Proposed Site PORC-02A will identify the semitransparent basement layer, proposed off-mound Site PORC-04A and the basal sequence of on-mound proposed site PORC-03A will identify the nature of the sigmoidal units. Both Sites PORC-02A and PORC-04A will constrain the age of the unconformity and the importance of the hiatus.The on-mound Site PORC-03A will unveil the environmental record locked in a carbonate mound and shed light on the processes that may have controlled the genesis of the mound, in particular, testing the hypothesis of the possible role of fluid venting as trigger for mound growth and assessing the importance of environmental forcing factors. Particular attention will be paid to microbiological and biogeochemical processes in mound genesis and development.