The Expedition SO242-2 took place between the 28th of August and 1st of October, 2015 and led from Guyayaquil, Ecuador, into the Peru Basin in the southern tropical Pacific and back to Guyayaquil.
The cruise led into the DISCOL area, in which 26 years ago some diusturbance experiments were conducted with respsect to the mining of manganses nodules. Aim of this leg was to locate and document the disturbances and investigate the degrfee of recovery for micro, meio, macro and megafauna as well as of the geochmistry.
ROV KIEL 6000 was one on the used platforms and 23 scientific dives were conducted in water depths aroung 4000 m. Main tasts included the documentation of old and fresh disturbances, the sampling of sediments by pushcores within and outside the tracks, the deployment of autonomous sensors such as profilers and chambers and the conduction of several different experiments for e.g, the measurement of respiration rates of holothurians (sea cucumbers) as well as their sensitivity to toxic and untoxic sediment coverage. One highlight was the documentation of the functionality of the newly developed crawler TRAMPER.
Like SO239, the expedition was conducted within the scope of the international JPI Oceans Project.
Photos (unless otherwise noted): ROV-Team GEOMAR; for enquiries on utilisation of image material please contact Public Relations Dpt. GEOMAR oder Dr. Friedrich Abegg.
