Spoonbills Blog

Early April 2024, a big dust cloud took off from Northwest Africa and was blown North across Western Europe. The dust caused spectacular sunsets and caught a lot of media attention. Since we know very little about long-distance aeolian (wind-blown)…

After several years of preparation, a team of NIOZ-NMF constructed a large mooring array in the harbor of La Seyne-sur-mer (Toulon, France) in 8 days of October 2020. The compacted array of 45 instrumented lines mounted on a steel cable grid inside a…

Between the 4th and 23rd of January, a team of scientists are on board the RV Pelagia to collect a second set of data and samples for the SEALINK project. This is a large, interdisciplinary project running from 2021 to 2025 in which Dutch and…

Ocean plastic debris has been recognised as a severe environmental problem in the ocean but we are only beginning to understand the role of particles

Staatsbosbeheer is voornemens een kerf aan te leggen in de Texelse zeereep. Deze zeereep dreigt namelijk te hoog, te steil en bovendien te smal te worden, waardoor kalkhoudend zandstrand het grijze-duin gebied achter de zeereep niet meer kan…

From November 2023 to February 2024, we will join the international EASI-2 research expedition to East Antarctica with 4 Dutch scientists: Rob Middag, Wytze Lenstra, Florine Kooij and Robin van Dijk. Our goal is to study bio-essential trace metals:…

From 9 - 12 October two NIOZ colleagues boarded the Italian tug Lione to recover, service and re-deploy the Mediterranean sediment-trap mooring that is part of a unique time series of Saharan dust collection since the late 1980's. The time series was…

Methane escapes from the seabed of the North Sea in various places. Recent German research suggested that this mainly occurs in the vicinity of abandoned wells. Methane is a potent greenhouse gas and its release into the sea and subsequent release…