POSEIDON POS527

The proposed research cruise is related to a European Union Horizon2020 project which has recently commenced (March 2016): “Strategies for Environmental Monitoring of Marine Carbon Capture and Storage” STEMM-CCS (http://www.stemm-ccs.eu/).
Contributions to the main objectives of STEMM-CCS supported by this cruise are:
(1) Pre-define and measure sensitive and robustly measurable environmental background variables which provide an indication for subsea CO2 leakage, prior to offshore CO2 storage operations. (2) Provide water column measurements of trace gases, nutrients, and carbonate chemistry variables to assess baseline conditions in the study region. Collect under natural (baseline) conditions a set of geochemical porewater data to provide a quantitative, process-based interpretation of porewater and benthic fluxes with the use of a state-of-the-art numerical model. The baseline data is needed for comparison with data obtained during artificial CO2-release experiments, which will be conducted in 2019 in the same area. (3) Undertake benthic ecology baseline measurements, to compare against conditions with perturbations from artificial CO2 release experiments (4) Test novel chemical sensors, and hydroacoustic detection systems for measuring benthic and pelagic carbon fluxes (i.e. by using lab-on-the-chip technology, optodes, eddy co-variance techniques for O2 and pH, 3D-visual bubble imaging, and (multibeam) echosounder quantification).