Professor Rachel Mills and her colleagues have now spent five weeks at sea on an expedition to the Mid-Atlantic Ridge called GA13 Fridge.
The team of scientists left Southampton on Wednesday 20 December 2017 on the Royal Research Ship (RRS) James Cook for the 42-day trip.
Southampton’s James Cook Christmas crew (above)
Professor Maeve Lohan is Southampton’s Project Principal Investigator on the expedition. She is joined by Professor Rachel Mills, NERC Research Fellow Dr Amber Annett, postdoctoral researcher Alastair Lough, PhD researchers Wenhao Wang and Dakota Gibbs and postgraduate research student Sarah Breimann, together with researchers from across the UK, USA, France, China and Malaysia.
The scientists will be measuring and exploring the widescale dispersion of hotspots of iron and other key trace elements that are injected into the deep ocean from hot hydrothermal vents along the volcanic Ridge.
“Iron is important to sustaining life in the sea and each of the vent sites in the Mid-Atlantic Ridge has differing underlying geology resulting in different amounts of iron being released,” explains Professor Maeve Lohan, the University’s Project Principal Investigator on the expedition. “Our goal is to understand what stabilises this iron – what keeps it in solution and allows it to be transported further afield and then impact on oceanic animal and plant life and, ultimately, the carbon cycle. We also want to improve our understanding of how different vent chemistry impacts the iron distribution.”
Professor Rachel Mills said before the trip:
“What inspired me most when I became a scientist is the chance to explore the deep and seeing things that no one has ever seen before.
“We now know that the metals coming out of these hydrothermal vents – which were first discovered 40 years ago – are being dispersed over hundreds, even thousands of kilometres and are having a really significant impact on the overall ocean.
“We’ll be collecting water samples at varying depths above the Ridge, some of which will be analysed on board ship while other samples will be brought back to our labs in Southampton and around the world for further study,” Professor Mills continues. “The researchers and PhD students on the expedition will be using these samples to answer new questions about how the oceans work and to kick off their careers in oceanography.”
Read the team’s latest blog entries:
