Ready for sail­ing - Blo­g­post 1 from RV SONNE, March 5, 2018

by Manfred Schlösser

San Ant­o­nio, Chile

Fri­day, March 2nd, 2018

Re­search ves­sel SONNE is still moored in the port of San Ant­o­nio at Pier 6. At the be­gin­ning of March on the Pa­cific coast of Chile, sum­mer tem­per­at­ures around 25 de­grees pre­vail. Cap­tain Lutz Mal­lon and his crew await a total of 40 sci­ent­ists from 17 dif­fer­ent parts of the world, in­clud­ing Den­mark, Italy, France, Ger­many, Aus­tria, Spain, Scot­land, Eng­land, Ire­land, Ni­geria, USA, Ja­pan, Canada, China and Taiwan. Ten re­search­ers come from Chile's Uni­ver­sidad de Con­cep­cion and two more from Peru.

Be­fore we leave port, there is a lot more to do. Boxes are be­ing un­packed, equip­ment as­sembled and in­stru­ments checked. There is still time for fi­nal ad­just­ments and re­pairs. For the new­comers on board, an­other chal­lenge is find­ing their way on the 116-meter-long ship. The re­search ves­sel SONNE with ten decks and many labor­at­or­ies can seem like a labyrinth. To make sure that no one gets lost, second of­ficer Lars Hoff­som­mer gives a de­tailed se­cur­ity brief­ing. He also ex­plains what spe­cial rules ap­ply for hu­man in­ter­ac­tion dur­ing the cruise. Where many people get to­gether in a re­l­at­ively small space, it is im­port­ant to take care of each other. For the next weeks, sci­ent­ists and crew will work to­gether to make this ex­ped­i­tion a suc­cess.

Chief Sci­ent­ist Frank Wen­zhöfer from the Max Planck In­sti­tute in Bre­men, Ger­many, co­ordin­ates between the ship's com­mand and the re­search­ers. He sums up the goal of this ex­ped­i­tion: "We will sail to the Atacama Trench, a deep-sea trench that stretches over hun­dreds of naut­ical miles west off the shores of Chile and Peru to a depth of 8000 meters. Our goal is to find out which bio­lo­gical pro­cesses take place in the wa­ter column and in the sed­i­ment. For this, we have many spe­cial­ists on board who brought along an ar­ray of sci­entific equip­ment to take meas­ure­ments and samples. It is im­port­ant to ex­am­ine the ex­tent to which deep-sea trenches act as a sink for car­bon, and which pro­cesses in­flu­ence the car­bon foot­print." The re­search will be co­ordin­ated with Ron­nie Glud from the Uni­versity of South­ern Den­mark in Odense, head of the HADES-ERC pro­ject.

Greet­ings from from the crew and the sci­entific party of So261,

Man­fred Schlösser

Read the corresponding press release.

More details about the project from the Uni­versity of South­ern Den­mark.

More pictures re­lated to the pro­ject.

Ron­nie N Glud at Dan­marks Radio (in Dan­ish)