Annual report 2019

Page 32

32  |  ANNUAL REPORT 2019

THE NANSEN LEGACY

December 2019: Processing the benthic trawl catch onboard RV Kronprins Haakon. Photo: Snorre Flo/UNIS. BY JANNE E. SØREIDE AND FRANK NILSEN

In 2019, UNIS participated in two major Nansen Legacy cruises in the polar night period. New information about life in the northern Barents Sea was obtained. The Nansen Legacy is a large Norwegian research project with 10 participating institutions. More than 130 researchers are engaged in the project, of which more than half are young recruits enrolled in PhD or postdoc programmes. UNIS is strongly involved in the project and has in total six recruitment positions during this fiveyear long project. In addition, UNIS provide significant in-kind contributions with faculty staff and logistical support. The overall aim of the Nansen Legacy is to gain a more comprehensive understanding of the climate in the northern Barents Sea and how this in turn affects fisheries and the entire ecosystem. Another important goal is to educate the next generation of Arctic scientists which is in line with the UNIS strategy. A total of 285 cruise days are funded through the project divided between physicists, biologists and technologists. In the joint Nansen Legacy and A-TWAIN/SIOS-InfraNor oceanographic cruise in early November 2019, engineers and scientists from eight institutions steamed around Svalbard to service moorings, deploy a Seaglider, and

make CTD profiles and transects with water samples. They successfully recovered and re-deployed the UNIS mooring between Edgeøya and Hopen that monitor possible Atlantic Water (AW) intrusion into the northern Barents Sea and the development of the sea ice cover in the region. Moreover, two new moorings were deployed east of Nordaustlandet to monitor inflow of AW from the north, between Nordaustlandet and Kvitøya. RV Kronprins Haakon had just returned from this intensive cruise before the biologists re-loaded the vessel and turned it around again in late November. The main aim: to study the living Barents Sea during the polar night. The cruise was co-led by UNIS and The Arctic University of Norway. Winter cruises are rarely conducted in the high Arctic. It is challenging to do field operations in continuous darkness, combined with often unstable and stormy weather as well as freezing cold temperatures and sea ice formation.

The first storm hit RV Kronprins Haakon just a few hours after it left Longyearbyen. Fortunately, it got better when getting into the pack ice at around 81°N. Here the sea was frozen and thus calm. RV Kronprins Haakon has polar ice class and made good 4 to 6 knots on its way to our northernmost station at 82⁰N with ocean depths of 3600 metres. Almost no data from this time of year exists and all on board were therefore very excited. It was amazing to see all the buzzing life in the ocean. We had assumed most life to be in “hibernation”, but it was measurable


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