Objectives

Long-Term Ocean Climate Observations (LOCO)

Cruise Objectives	Image: © Rosentiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science
The Mozambique Channel is a very interesting area, which however has rarely been studied. Until very recently it was generally assumed that the flow through the Mozambique Channel was southward and continuous. Also the sea charts and atlasses of the region noted a continuous, southward flowing Mozambique Current along the African continental margin. In 2000 Dutch and South African oceanographers showed that the southward flow is not continuous, but rather in the form of a series of large anti-cyclonic (= counter
clockwise rotating) eddies, slowly migrating southward along the East African coast. These eddies seem to initialize the meandering of the Agulhas Current along East coast of South Africa, thereby influencing the formation of Agulhas rings. The Agulhas rings are the main vehicle of transport and exchange between the Indian Ocean and the South Atlantic Ocean. Via this connection the flow through the Mozambique Channel controls the inter-ocean exchange of water, heat and salt between the Indian Ocean and the South Atlantic Ocean many hundres of miles to the South-East.
The flow through the Mozambique Channel is studied with of a series of moored current meters at various depths. Since 2000 between 6 and 9 moorings with current meters have been continuously moored at the narrowest part of the Mozambique Channel. The current meters measure the direction and velocity of the current every 30 minutes and record the measurements on an internal storage device. To study the data, the mooring needs to be recovered onboard, where the storage devices can be read and batteries can be replaced to prepare the instruments for a new period of deployment.	Current meter
General Information
The purpose of the present cruise with the British RV Discovery is to: Recover, service and redeploy an array of instrumented moorings Determine hydrographic properties along the mooring section Obtain long sediment cores by piston coring Obtain short surface sediment cores These activities will be carried out at the narrowest section of the Mozambique Channel, between Mozambique and Madagascar. Here, a long-term mooring array was deployed in the end of 2003. The moorings will be recovered in the end of 2008. Every 1-1.5 years a research cruise is planned for servicing the moorings and doing some additional scientific research. The present cruise in March 2005 is the first cruise for servicing.