Fieldwork

Regular day cruises operating out of Haifa will be supplemented by two larger scale process studies undertaken on German research vessels.

Cruise M197

During 30 December 2023 to 06 February 2024 we will sail from Haifa, Israel to Catania, Italy on-board the research vessel Meteor. Cruise M197 has the following objectives: (i) characterizing nutrient biogeochemistry and phytoplankton nutrient limitation  of seawaters in the Eastern Mediterranean Sea (EMS), (ii) documenting in detail the microbial communities that inhabit these waters from the surface ocean to sediments, (iii) assessing mechanistic connections between nutrient biogeochemistry, surface ocean productivity, deeper water metabolism, and shelf sediments in the cycling of carbon and major nutrients, (iv) using the sedimentary record to assess past environmental change in the EMS. Our observations on the M197 research cruise will be used alongside existing autonomous platforms in the EMS and satellite observations to document spatial/temporal change.