We’re on our second week into our Indian Ocean voyage aboard the Nansen, and on Sunday we deployed the BioArgo floats.
We’ve already written about the Argo floats in an earlier post, which also contains a helpful infographic explaining exactly how these floats operate, and how they can provide us with scientific data from this under-sampled part of the Indian Ocean.
We can expect these floats to be sending data to the closest research station for analysis within 6-12 months. The floats dive to 500 metres, eventually reaching a depth of up to 2000 metres, and slowly moves to the surface. It gathers data on temperature, salinity, fluorescence, oxygen, which will later be analyzed in a laboratory. It drifts with the currents.
In addition to the excitement of launching the floats, our daily research still continues. At regular intervals, we trawl for fish. When we see fish on the echosounder, we trawl applying a fine meshed pelagic trawl.
So far, we’ve only seen mesopelagic fish (see the image to see the most common species we’ve found), but it is a very interesting group of fish spread widely over large areas of the ocean. It will be interesting to see if we will consistently register mesopelagic fish all over the ocean.
We are now entering the south Indian Ocean gyre, and it will be interesting to see if production, plankton, fish change as we move westwards. Our plastics research, already well underway as you’ll see from earlier posts, will pick up in the gyre, and we urge you to follow this interesting research.
We remind you that our blog is open to your comments and questions – be sure to call out to one of us onboard if there’s anything you want to know about our Indian Ocean research.
07/07/2015