Into the blue

Tara Oceans is a French sailboat on a 3-year expedition across the world to study the oceanic ecosystems and the threats faced by them. She set sail from Lorient, France, on September 5, 2009, with a motley team of scientists aboard. I visited her when she was in Mumbai in March. Unfortunately she was barred from collecting samples by the government.

Tara is currently on her way to Rio de Janeiro.

(Indian Express, March 28 2010)

pic courtesy: http://oceans.taraexpeditions.org

Marine ecosystems are the most complex and least well-known to man despite being significant indicators of global health. It is known that the waters, which cover two-thirds of our planet, are home to several ‘oxygen factories’ like the phytoplankton. However, the world of oceanic microbes remains largely unexplored. In a bid to create a database of these remarkably complex organisms, nearly 100 oceanographers, biologists, geneticists and physicists from some of the world’s best laboratories have set out on an incredible expedition across international boundaries, aboard the sailboat Tara Oceans, to study them.
Tara Oceans, sponsored by the United Nations Environment Programme and French fashion designer Agnes B, set sail from Lorient, Brittany, on September 5, and was in Mumbai for a brief stopover from Thursday to Saturday, before moving on to Goa and then to Male, Maldives. Chris Bowler, a scientist from the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS), who is heading the expedition, said: “Our effort is to provide snapshots of how the ocean looks in the 21st century so that 100 years from now, there’s a record, which can form a basis for further research. Today, we know that the seas are acidifying and scientists often speculate how the condition would affect the food chain.”

Three years on the high seas
For the next three years, Tara Oceans will sail around the world collecting samples of deep water ecosystems, documenting sea temperatures, salinity, acidity and pollution and understanding marine life adaptation to environmental stress. “We plan to sail 80,000 nautical miles covering the Indian Ocean this year, the South Atlantic and the South Pacific the next, and across the northern seas in 2012 before returning to Lorient,” said Romain Troublé, operational manager for Tara Oceans. At any given time, the boat will lodge six scientists, six sailors and two international journalists.
A thousand litres of sample waters from different depths will be collected every two days. Plankton and other organisms collected will be preserved. Every three weeks, 300 kg of the samples will be couriered from the sailboat to the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Heidelberg, and from there to labs in France, Spain, Arizona, etc., Troublé explained. Having travelled 15,000 nautical miles so far, the team is set to see the outcome of their first leg of research in the Mediterranean Sea and the Red Sea.

Not smooth sailing in India
THE team, however, is facing a hitch in Indian waters. “It’s a pity that we are unable to conduct research in 200 nautical miles of Indian waters because we couldn’t get the necessary permissions from authorities. However, we are now trying to get help from the National Institute of Oceanography in Goa,” Troublé said. “We are considering including a few NIO scientists in our expedition, but they will join us later, in the South Atlantic Ocean.” The only other country where the crew couldn’t get permission was Oman.

State-of-the-art system
Marc Picheral, an oceanographic engineer from France who has developed the scientific systems in the sailboat, said, “Our advanced equipments include a three-dimensional microscope called Spim which gives a complete view of organisms, flow cams and special microscopes that remain stable in a moving boat.” However, the star tool of the expedition is the Conductivity Temperature Depth (CTD) profiler, an all-in-one instrument which combines a high-resolution camera with a host of sensors to measure salinity, temperature, pressure, turbidity and depth and a system of bottles to collect water samples automatically. The CTD can be lowered to depths of up to 2,000 metres.
According to Jennifer Gillette, a cell biologist from the National Institute of Health, Maryland, USA, who has been onboard as an optical engineer for a month, “In the past month, I have documented images of thousands of phytoplankton and zooplankton, many of which have almost no reference in the existing literature. We are now studying their taxonomy.” The first large scale study will include DNA and genetic make-up, physical and chemical analysis.

Marvels of the sea
“We can’t wait to reach the southern bend of the Indian Ocean, where a unique cycle occurs. Here, gyres, or rings formed in the water, push a layer of water around Africa’s Cape Town all the way across the Atlantic Ocean to South America in a process called ‘seeding’. We are observing these waters through satellite—they are rich in planktons peculiar to the Indian Ocean, which are taken into the Atlantic to form an interesting colony. We also plan to study the water in regions with concentration of plastic waste, high pH levels, and coral reefs,” Bowler said. The route of Tara Oceans was put together according to three factors: the areas for research chosen by the scientists, the progress of the seasons in the northern and southern hemispheres and the direction of the prevailing wind, since winds are a determining factor for the voyage of a sailing ship.