Pulse mooring to be deployed from Aurora Australis
Dr Tom Trull will lead a group this Friday to Antarctica on the icebreaker Aurora Australis to deploy the Pulse moorings. The equipment will be recovered in April 2009.
Professor Gary Meyers, IMOS Director, with the surface float of the Pulse mooring
Floats that will form part of the Pulse mooring on the wharf in Hobart
The SOTS group will attempt to capture data from the rough Southern Ocean using ground-breaking monitoring equipment to be deployed at sea later this week.
The Southern Ocean’s notoriously turbulent water has previously made it almost impossible for researchers to take important surface ocean readings.
One of the greatest challenges is engineering a float to prevent the instruments from being torn from their mooring in the inhospitable Southern Ocean, where swells reach up to 20 metres.
SOTS are developing specially-engineered ocean measuring moorings that will be used to measure currents and other physical oceanographic properties, as well as to collect marine biological data.
The PULSE mooring technology has been developed over several years in a joint project by CSIRO and the Antarctic Climate & Ecosystems Cooperative Research Centre (ACE CRC). IMOS this year integrated the mooring technology into its Southern Ocean Time Series project (SOTS).
The hope is this latest generation of moorings will provide accurate readings in the world’s toughest conditions.
SOTS Facility leader Tom Trull says that if this latest design is successful, scientific instruments to measure ocean conditions will be added in future years. The goal this year is to test two different engineering designs, using instruments to send measurements of mooring stresses from waves and currents back to the laboratory via satellite.
“When the moorings are fully operational, these instruments will be used to determine how ocean conditions affect phytoplankton growth and associated carbon uptake into marine ecosystems,” Dr Trull said.
They will provide information on how carbon is moved from the atmosphere to the deep ocean through a natural ‘biological pump’ system that moves about 10 gigatonnes of carbon per year from the surface to the deep sea.
Dr Trull said the new equipment will help determine if this process will speed up or slow down due to climate change.
“The deep sediment trap mooring will measure the amount of material sinking to the deep sea south of Tasmania, as well as the rate at which it sinks. This sinking of organic matters sequesters carbon dioxide away from the atmosphere,” he said.
The SOTS facility, with a budget of almost $6million, is coordinated and managed by staff at UTAS, CSIRO Marine and Atmospheric Research, ACE CRC and the Bureau of Meteorology.
For Full media release click here
To listen to Simon Allen , IMOS Technical Director, discuss the deployment, click here.
To see Reuters article click here.