Expedition PS108 took place between August 26th and September 10th, 2017 in the Fram Strait which is located between Greenland and Svalbard.
Main objective of the expedition were testing and documenting the performance of newly developed subsea systems such as crawlers and gliders. The main task or ROV KIEL 6000 was the documentation of the functionality of the AWI crawler TRAMPER an the GEOMAR crawler system MANSIO-VIATOR.
In addition, the ROV did some work in the so called AWI Hausgarten. At first, fauna was sampled for ground-truthing of images. During a second dive, sediment samples were taken in the close vicinity of artificial dropstones. Last but not least, the ROV managed to recover a frame with a settlement experiment which had been deployed 19 years ago.
Due to poor weather conditions further dives for working in the Hausgarten area could not be conducted. Thus, ROV KIEL 6000 accomplished 6 dives in water depths between 250 and 2500 m. Total bottom time accumulated to approximately 35 hours.
Images (unless otherwise noted): ROV-Team GEOMAR; for enquiries on utilisation of image material please contact Public Relations Dpt. GEOMAR oder Dr. Friedrich Abegg.
