SOLACE voyage

Voyage summary

Research voyage out of Hobart to the Southern Ocean to study and quantify carbon sequestration in subpolar and polar waters. This research is part of the SOLACE (Southern Ocean Large Area Carbon Export ) project and seeks to capture a detailed picture of how plant life in the Southern Ocean helps remove carbon dioxide from the Earth’s atmosphere.

The voyage will combine ship-board observations, deep-diving robotic profiling floats, automated ocean gliders and satellite measurements to improve understanding of the movement of carbon between the atmosphere and ocean via biological pathways. A program of trawling will also be used to survey marine life in the twilight zone (ocean between 200m to 1000m depths). The twilight zone contains the largest and least exploited fish stocks of the world’s oceans.

Ship-board measurements will be taken at two primary sites: 1) SOTS (Southern Ocean Time Series ) site, and 2) location of a polar bloom (high chlorophyll feature) at approximately 55˚S.

The voyage also includes the following research projects:

• Cosmic ray measurements from underway instrument (Dr Grahame Rosolen, CSIRO)
• Cloud Aerosol Precipitation Radiation Interactions eXperiment - CAPRIX (Dr Alain Protat, BOM)

The science team on this voyage includes 32 participants from four institutions: CSIRO, University of Tasmania, Australian National University (ANU) and Curtin University.

This will be the second time the vessel has been at sea over Christmas.

Voyage outcomes

Summary of voyage outcomes - as well as voyage image gallery - will be published approximately three months after the completion of the voyage.