Upcoming Expedition "MAURIBO"
Upcoming Expedition: North West African climate change, cold water corals, past ecosystems and spectacular engineering - "MAURIBO" MSM127-2 17.03.-20.04.2024
In mid-March, Jannis Viola, a Phd student in the team will join a research cruise (MSM127-2) along the coast of North West Africa and the continental slope off Mauritania. This area is characterized by high productivity (driven by coastal upwelling) and high sedimentation rates. The Mauritanian continental slope hosts the largest known province of cold-water coral mounds in the Atlantic, provides a high-resolution palaeoarchive of climate change in NW Africa, allows analysis of the influence of sea-level change on methane seepage, and provides an ideal test field for investigations into the applicability of 'ancient DNA' in marine sediments and the robustness of proxy data.
The research cruise "MAURIBO", led by MARUM and the Bremen Cluster of Excellence "The Ocean Floor - Earth's Uncharted Interface", aims to obtain long sediment records with the Bremen seafloor drilling rig MeBo70, to collect water, plankton and sediment samples.
Our focus will be on generating arrays of sediment cores to construct noise-corrected records of NW African climate change from recent times through the Holocene to the Last Glacial Maximum. In addition, the proxy-based reconstructions of past environmental conditions will provide an environmental context for the aDNA results.
Tune in again in May after the return of the MAURIBO expedition.
Until then, you can see the position of the research vessel Maria S. Merian here:
www.hamburg.de/maria-s-merian-position/
read ship logs and reports of past expeditions:
www.marum.de/en/Discover/Ships-logs.html
or check out this cool animation explaining the MeBo70 drilling rig: