On Monday, 9 May 2011, 4 pm local time in Chile we left the port of Punta Arenas and set sail for the Southern Ocean. The steaming time to our first site was about 34 hours and this morning we started our actual work.
The main purpose of the cruise is to collect deep-sea corals across the major oceanographic fronts found in the Southern Ocean. By combining a biology team, lead by
Co-I Rhian Waller, and a palaeo team, lead by PI Laura Robinson, we will try to tackle questions reaching from current habitats of deep-sea corals, to how their distribution may have been different in the past and why. We will also use the fossil (dead corals) to address outstanding question in palaeoclimate research.
For example, I will mainly use the fossil corals we to reconstruct the structure and distribution of water masses in the Southern Ocean in the past. We currently think that there was a significant change in the way water masses were distributed and ventilated in the Southern Ocean during glacial times, and that this restructuring of the ocean played a major role in glacial-interglacial changes in atmospheric carbon dioxide. However, records directly from the Southern Ocean are sparse, and with the corals we will collect on this cruise we will try to fill this gap.
On top of collecting corals, we are also going to collect a lot of complementary material. We will take images of the seafloor using a towed camera system, we will collect seawater samples to identify the chemistry of water modern corals are growing in, and we will also try to collect a bit of sediment to be able to compare this to the seawater chemistry and coral chemistry. Over the last days we had to familiarise us with the protocols to do all this, and we are glad that operations finally started.
A first report on how we are doing at our first site on the shelf will be coming up later this week or early next week!