Marine Discovery project

Mallorca

MALLORCA - TWO-HUNDRED years after the death of Alejandro Malaspina, the sailor who conducted Spain’s first scientific circumnavigation, the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientificas (CSIC) or Scientific Research Council, are to launch an even more ambitious project. In honour of Malaspinas’ efforts, the new marine project is to be named after him and will involve over four hundred scientific researchers, two ships equipped with all the most modern technologies and forty-two thousand nautical miles.

The main aim behind the project is to ascertain the impacts of global warming and to explore in more depth the biodiversity which exists, still undiscovered, in the world’s oceans. It is planned to collect more than seventy thousand samples of air, water and plankton from the world’s waters which will be collected and analysed by an ever rotating team of international scientists from all around the globe.

Fifty PhD students are to complete their theses based on work carried on this expedition, some of which are based at the UIB (University of the Balearic Islands) in Mallorca. In total four people from the UIB, three people from the Balearic Oceanographic Centre and some fourteen scientists from Imedea (Mediterranean Institute of Advanced Studies) will be directly involved, taking passage on the ship for a few months.

The expedition is to commence with one ship, the Hesperides, leaving from Cadiz at the end of November to investigate the Ocean’s role in absorbing carbon dioxide, (approximately forty per cent of carbon dioxide generated by humans is diluted by the sea), as well as investigating biodiversity beyond one thousand metres and down to six thousand metres in depth.

The second ship, the Saramiento de Gamboa, will be departing from Las Palmas in the Canary Islands and sailing to Miami, from where various return journeys will be made in order to study Atlantic water currents and the effects global warming has on them.

It is hoped that this expedition is to broaden human knowledge of an area in which so little is known and put Spain back on the Marine map.

Photo Credit: luc.viatour