Going west

Yesterday, RV Sonne left Balboa heading northwest towards our first working area in the central Pacific nodule province. Over the next 50 days 40 scientists from 11 different countries will be investigating biological and geological aspects of polymetallic nodule fields which are located between the Clarion and the Clipperton Fracture Zone (CCZ) in the north-eastern equatorial Pacific. Stretching from the southeast of Hawaii to the west of Mexico the CCZ covers a vast area spanning millions of square kilometres of abyssal (>3000 m) seafloor. This region hosts one of the World’s economically most valuable deposits of polymetallic nodules; the latter are rock formations with an average size of 5-10 cm which contain precious metals such as cobalt, nickel, and copper.

Due to an increasing demand and rising metal prices, countries such as Germany, France, Belgium and the UK have applied for licences to explore and exploit these resources in the future. The extraction of polymetallic nodules would have negative effects on the deep-sea environment; though in which way mining will alter faunal communities and their habitat is still poorly understood.

During the EcoResponse cruise we will be gaining information on the potential ecological implications of deep-sea mining. How will abyssal communities respond to mining impacts, how fast will they recover and from where could impacted areas be recolonised? These are the main questions we are going to focus on. Therefore we will visit several license areas in the CCZ to take biological samples, map the seafloor, deploy landers and to conduct experiments using a wide range of sampling devices such as corers, deep-sea sledges, traps and underwater vehicles.

Over the next few weeks we will use this platform to introduce ourselves and our working programme and to share our findings. For now, though, we are looking forward to an exciting cruise which will hopefully help to close some knowledge gaps of a huge though largely unexplored region.