27 March

Long-Term Ocean Climate Observations (LOCO) – D301/302

Cruise Diary – 27^th March 2006

Erica and Socrates

Monday - Weather conditions similar like yesterday: tropical hot and a flat ocean. The scientific work went very successfully with the recovery of the last two moorings on the Madagascar side of the channel and a number of CTD stations and one Multicore stations during night.

With a multicore samples from the seafloor are taken. A frame is lowered to the seafloor and subsequently weights push small (diameter roughly 10 cm) cylinders into the bottom to a depth of some 50 cm. Then these cylinders are closed from below and the samples are taken to deck. Busy hours for Erica and Socrates then start. They take these samples (see picture) to a 'climate controlled' room. There the temperature is kept at the same level as the temperature of the seafloor.

Depending on the depth where the samples come from this varies between 2 and 10 degrees. Thus they wear warm clothes since they have to be in there for a few hours to do measurements. Strange view by the way if they come out and look like coming from a European winter! Measurements are done to determine fluxes of nutrients etc. between the seafloor and the water column.

Our work is now in the neighborhood of a very small, roughly 5 by 2 km, French tropical island, Juan de Nova. We can clearly see it when we pass. The French still posses a number of these islands in the Mozambique Channel. International laws give them the exclusive right on a so-called economical zone of 200 miles around the island. Thus we are in French territory now. In fact a very large part of the Mozambique Channel still is French. The captain has to sent daily plans of what we are doing to the French authorities in la Reunion, a much larger island to the south east of Madagascar. Strange idea to be in European waters here.

Juan de Nova