A team of 26 scientists will set off for antarctica today on-board research vessel investigator to carry out vital climate science in the Southern Ocean. The vessel will travel as far as 65 degrees south and is expected to take 60- days - the longest trip in its 10-year history. Co-chief scientist Dr Annie Foppert from the University of Tasmania is onboard the investigator, and she says this voyage is about looking for climate clues.
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00:00 We'll be measuring ocean samples from all the depths of the ocean to understand the
00:07 different properties of the ocean and track how that's changing.
00:11 And what's amazing about the Southern Ocean is that everything is interconnected, so we
00:15 can't really understand how it all fits together unless we measure all the pieces.
00:20 So we've got the physics, the biogeochemistry, the biology, and the atmosphere above.
00:26 We're going out to measure from the ship to take direct measurements, which is absolutely
00:31 crucial to understand the system.
00:35 And what we'll also be deploying are a dozen deep diving robots that will sample the ocean
00:43 from the sea surface all the way down to 6,000 meters every 10 days for up to about five
00:49 years.
00:50 And so they'll be really doing the hard yards.
00:52 And it's, as you know, very difficult to get out on a ship, and so these robots will be
00:57 observing the ocean in ways that were never possible until now.
01:01 They dive down to the bottom, and then they come up and drift around for about 10 days,
01:05 coming back up to the sea surface, relaying the information to us by satellite, and then
01:09 do it all over again and just drift wherever the ocean currents take them.
01:14 What we know is that the Southern Ocean takes up a vast amount of heat and carbon dioxide
01:19 from the atmosphere and stores it in the interior ocean for decades to up to millennia.
01:25 That acts as an effectively a handbrake on climate change and how we feel the effects
01:29 of climate change on land.
01:32 We don't know how that sink of carbon dioxide and heat into the Southern Ocean will change
01:37 in the future, and that's one of the main things that we seek to understand on this
01:40 voyage.
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