One Ocean Expeditions' vessel, Akademik Loffe, will set sail on August 23rd for 22 days with a team of scientists, students, and a film crew to study the Arctic Ocean. The first-ever live broadcasts are planned for select museums, classrooms, and citizen scientists worldwide.
Pictured above: The Akademik Loffe will set sail in late August 2018 to conduct climate change studies in the Canadian Arctic. FlowCam will be aboard and used for plankton research. Credit: One Ocean Expeditions.
Aboard the Akademik Ioffe, the team will collect water, ice, and air samples to advance the understanding of and document the effect climate change is having on the environment and biodiversity in the Canadian Arctic Archipelago.
The expedition's chief scientist, Dr. Brice Loose of the University of Rhode Island Graduate School of Oceanography, is coordinating and leading the research into the exchange of greenhouse gases between the water and atmosphere, and changes in distribution and abundance of two vulnerable levels of the Arctic food web – plankton and seabirds.
Scientific research areas include:
- The physics of Arctic ocean circulation: transpolar water drift through the Canadian Arctic Archipelago (CAA)
- Chemistry of the melting Arctic and marginal seas: Water column chemistry affecting greenhouse gas fluxes
- Ecosystem surveys of Arctic habitats in transition: Distribution and abundance of zooplankton and phytoplankton
- Ecosystem surveys of Arctic habitats in transition: Distribution and abundance of seabirds
As the Arctic waters warm and the sea ice cover decreases, the Arctic surface ocean ecosystem is anticipated to undergo considerable changes. Habitats are changing and moving, perhaps disappearing, and species distribution and abundance may also change rapidly.
The Northwest Passage Project will periodically conduct plankton net tows in the upper water column (100m and less) to observe phytoplankton and zooplankton. The contents of the nets will be cataloged, and the organisms collected in these net tows will be counted with a laboratory bench-top FlowCam.
The FlowCam counts and images micrometer-size particles using an imaging microscope. This allows the identification and quantification of 'particles' from a sampled volume. These particles can be sediment, phytoplankton, or even zooplankton. This imaging system generates a library of images for each run and stores them for processing later.
Learn more about FlowCam for Phytoplankton and Zooplankton Research
