As many people around Europe start to wind down for the summer holidays, the EPOC science teams are gearing up for the research cruise season. Three expeditions are on the calendar for the July – October period, starting with a month-long mission to the Flemish Cap region of the NW Atlantic, starting in late July. Here, the German research vessel Meteor will collect important new observational data from this complex and dynamic area of the Atlantic, as well as recover some of the instruments deployed two years ago.
Led by University of Bremen’s Christian Mertens, the team will use a range of instruments to observe the complex interactions between the warm and salty North Atlantic Current (NAC) flowing northward, and the opposing Deep Western Boundary Current (DWBC). The data collected will add to that provided by the growing suite of EPOC instrumentation in the area, which includes current meter moorings deployed in October 2023, and an inverted echo sounder array which will be recovered on this expedition. The team on board will be sending regular reports from the ship – to find out more and follow their progress, please visit the M212 expedition pages.
The current meter moorings deployed at Flemish Cap in October 2023 will be recovered by a French-led mission to the Flemish Cap region later in the autumn. The CROSSROAD-2 cruise aboard RV L’Atalante in September-October 2025 is dedicated to the recovery of the 10 mooring lines deployed in 2023 and 2024, as well as recovery of two EPOC bottom pressure recorders for EPOC. In addition, large-scale and small-scale hydrography transects will be surveyed, sediment cores will be collected at the mooring locations, and autonomous floats (e.g., Argo and RAFOS) will be deployed.
Meanwhile, in late July to mid-August the Norwegian Polar Institute (NPI) will conduct its annual expedition to the Fram Strait, where they have maintained an observing system in the East Greenland Current to monitor freshwater and sea ice outflow from the Arctic Ocean since 1991. The East Greenland Current is affected by Arctic change, with diminishing sea ice cover and increasing ocean temperatures and ocean acidification. This summer, the National Oceanography Centre (NOC) will join the NPI’s expedition aboard RV Kronprins Haakon to deploy two ‘Lab-on-a-Chip’ biogeochemical sensor systems on the observatory moorings. These new autonomous sensor observations of nitrate, phosphate, pH and alkalinity will allow us to identify the impact on biogeochemistry in this fast-changing environment. The new deployments will also link into a component of the BIOPOLE project (funded by UK Research and Innovation) that is looking at effects of Arctic change being exported into the North Atlantic and their downstream impacts on primary productivity and carbon/nutrient cycling. Together with other new biogeochemical observations being collected in Davis Strait, these novel measurements will provide an improved understanding of both the variability of Arctic carbon and nutrient exports and their far-field effects.
