News

Cruise diary: MAREANO's first cruise of 2015 set sail from Tromsø last Friday bound for the new Norwegian area of the Barents Sea. Sixteen scientists and technicians will spend the next two weeks onboard the research vessel G.O. Sars, investigating one of the world's richest seas. The benthic environment and faunal communities over an area of 12 000 km² is to be sampled while a total of 44 line kilometers across 60 sites will be filmed with high resolution video.

MAREANO’s 2015 geological, biological and chemical field sampling will take place at the shelf slope off mid-Norway in the Norwegian Sea, and in the Barents Sea along the Russian-Norwegian shelf border. Bathymetric data are being acquired in the Barents Sea along the Russian-Norwegian shelf border and patch-wise along a ca. 500 km long transect from Bjørnøyrenna to Kong Karls Land as well as at the shelf slope off mid-Norway and Stadhavet in the Norwegian Sea.

The bottom currents have a large impact on the sea floor and the animals that live there. It is difficult to measure the bottom currents over large areas, but improved models have now opened up the ability to estimate the bottom currents at reasonable accuracy. In MAREANO, the results are used in mapping the nature types.

A number of different coral reefs have been discovered in waters off the Norwegian coast. The Røst Reef off Norway’s Lofoten Islands is the world's largest known Lophelia reef. That these corals almost encircle the entire North Atlantic is more unknown.

MAREANO continues with bathymetric mapping in the Barents Sea in 2015. An open procedure of the tender competition for the procurement of Bathymetry data acquisition and processing for the MAREANO programme was published 8 December 2014.

A new biotope map for the area including Troms III and the shelf edge to west Finnmark is now available on MAREANO's map service.

Cruise diary: MAREANO's last biology-geology-pollution mapping cruise this season is finished, and once more we have had good weather in the Barents Sea. Thus, we have finished all cruise activities that were planned for this year, in addition to making a small start on next year's tasks.

Cruise diary: This newsletter has been written by all the biologists onboard the G.O.Sars at the last biogy and geology cruise in 2014. Each biologist has picked her favourite photo from the work on this cruise, and they have written a story for that picture.  There are many different voices here, this reflects both the diversity we see in the benthic communities – and the diversity among the biologists.

Cruise diary: The Mareano 3 cruise also includes deployment of a new type of underwater glider - a 'SeaExplorer' - to complete a north-south transect of the Barents Sea. Two guests from the LOCEAN laboratory in Paris are on board the G.O. Sars for the deployment: glider engineer Michael Field and PhD student Laurent Oziel. The SeaExplorer was successfully deployed from the rescue boat on 2 September.

Cruise diary: 700 meters is almost as long as twice around a sport-field. It is also the length of one MAREANO video-transect. In some areas all 700 meters will look much the same, but other times we observe large variations along the line. This is the story about a transect with lots of changes.

MAREANO video footage crossing a long, elongated cliff north of Varangerhalvøya has shown the presence of irregular holes in the seabed. Strange white features occur at the bottom of the holes and in two larger depressions.

One unexpected finding as MAREANO completed data collection along the Finnmark coast has been the presence of shell sand at more than three hundred metres water depth, off Nordkapp.

Cruise diary: This week marks the start of the third and last MAREANO cruise in 2014. Onboard R/V G.O. Sars, we find 16 enthusiastic researchers and technicians who are all ready to examine the seafloor of the Finnmark coast and the SE Norwegian part of the Barents Sea.

Over the past five years MAREANO has conducted several mapping cruises along the coast of Finnmark. Starting in August 2014, the third and final MAREANO cruise of the year will map the remaining areas in the coastal belt, focusing on areas north of Sørøya, Magerøya and Nordkinnhalvøya.

The MAREANO cruise was undertaken to survey the sea floor at Storegga, Norwegian Sea. In order to achieve this we took a multitude of video stations coupled with a few beam trawls, RP nets, grabs and cores.

Last autumn MAREANO scientists documented the geology and biology of the southern part of Storegga, which lies at the edge of the continental shelf in mid-Norway. Now we are back to complete the journey through this fascinating underwater landscape, armed with new multibeam data that complete the picture of the terrain on the shelf.

A more updated look and easier navigation is the most visible changes in the new map service on www.mareano.no. With a few keystrokes, you can create your own maps based on interest.

VIDEO: During the MAREANO-survey April 13–26 a large number of king crabs were observed at about 40 m depth just off the village Berlevåg in the northernmost Norwegian county Finnmark. It is well-known that the king crab thrive in this area and was on its way towards deeper waters after a short trip to quite shallow depths where hatching, spawning and mating take place at this time of the year.

Cruise diary: Sunday April 13 at 13.30 we left Tromsø and have since conducted 26 video transects and six
sampling stations, where a suite of gears is used.

Toktdagbok: Søndag 13. april kl. 13.30 la ”G.O. Sars” fra kai i Tromsø i et utrolig vakkert vær. Vår første stasjon var rett nord for Sørøya. Vi startet med videoopptak på 200 meters dyp ved midnatt, og observerte sandbunn med mye grus og stein hvor bunnforhold og bunndyr var lite variert.

In its tenth year, MAREANO is to survey both the Norwegian and the Barents Sea. Bathymetric measurements in the Barents Sea have been undergoing since January along the Russian-Norwegian border while the 2014 start-up in the Norwegian Sea took place in March. The biological, geological and chemical sampling will start on April 13 off the coast of Finnmark and in the south-eastern part of the Barents Sea, and on June 16 in the Norwegian Sea, northeast of Mørebankene.

Video footage acquired during MAREANOs latest cruise at Skoldryggen has revealed why the inside of pockmarks at 440 m depth on the seabed appear harder than the surrounding seabed, when seen on multibeam backscatter images. Carbonate crusts have been found at the bottom of the pockmarks (Figure 1).

Once again, a polychaete species has been discovered in samples from a MAREANO survey. The new species has been named Scalibregma hanseni and was collected in subzero temperatures at 765 meter depth from the continental slope in the Norwegian Sea.

A biotope map for the Norwegian Sea based on video data from MAREANO 2012 is now available on www.mareano.no. Biotopes are regions with similar communities of animals living on the seabed, in a similar physical environment. Maps such as these, which bring together the physical and biological attributes of the seabed, can provide particularly valuable information for sustainable management.

MAREANO scientists have now produced a biotope map for the Nordland VI area in Northern Norway. "Biotope" is a term used to describe the main biological communities and the physical environment they inhabit.  MAREANO video data were to determine the biological communities and this information was put together with bathymetry, terrain and geological data to model the overall distribution of biotopes.

You'll never have seen anything like this before! A small bristle worm, just a few centimetres long, suddenly decides to withdraw into its house, closing the door tightly behind it.

The small crustacean Neohela monstrosa waits patiently in its cave for small animals to pass, so that it can pounce on them and eat them. In the video you can see what happened to a krill that decided to take a breather right outside the cave.

Cruise diary: MAREANO is currently mapping the southern part of Storegga, along the shelf edge and slope areas where a series of underwater landslides have occurred, most recently the famous Storegga slide, which dramatically altered the underwater landscape here some 8200 years ago.

The last piece of the bottom areas on and around Mørebankene are now surveyed by MAREANO after two weeks work aboard the research ship G.O. Sars (see sampling stations in the map below). A varying benthic fauna living within old avalanches and on plains has been videotaped and sampled. The rate is now set for the waters off the coastline from Kristiansund to Haltenbanken.

Cruise diary: On Sunday 22nd September the research vessel G.O. Sars sailed from Kristiansund to begin MAREANO's third cruise in 2013. During this cruise several areas off the coast of Møre and Trøndelag in mid-Norway will be documented using underwater video and various equipment for sampling the seabed.