SOTS: automated moorings for climate and carbon cycle studies in the Southern Ocean

Research voyage to the Southern Ocean to maintain long-term deep-water automated moorings for monitoring of ocean and climate.

This voyage will contribute to global data sets and increase understanding of Southern Ocean characteristics, variability and processes. The Southern Ocean Time Series (SOTS) moorings provide year-long observations in a critical part of the Southern Ocean, where ocean interactions are most intense and least studied. This is information vital for informing ocean and climate modelling.

The primary voyage objective is to deploy a new set of SOTS moorings (SOFS-9 and SAZ-22) and then recover the existing SOTS moorings (SOFS-8 and SAZ-21).

There are four other projects included on this voyage:

• Silica production by phytoplankton (Dr Katherina Petrou, University of Technology Sydney): water sampling to study silica production in natural phytoplankton communities along a latitudinal gradient of Eastern Australia.
• Dust to the ocean: does it really increase productivity? (Prof Zanna Chase, University of Tasmania): quantifying dust deposition to the ocean and its chemical and ecological impact using new geochemical techniques.
• MNF equipment trials - two projects: several scientific equipment tests and capability upgrades.

SOTS is part of the Integrated Marine Observing System (IMOS), a global monitoring program to collect long time-series ocean data to better understand ocean and climate change and variability.

The science team on this voyage will have 21 participants (and 20 crew) representing five institutions.

Voyage outcomes

Summary of voyage outcomes will be published approximately three months after the completion of the voyage.