Portal de Cartagena
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A large oceanographic ship equipped with the most advanced technologies and fifteen robotic vehicles to explore the unknown Subtropical Front of the Pacific Ocean, a place between California and Hawaii where the great ocean currents converge and unique conditions for underwater life are generated.
This is the mission on which the researchers of the group in Ecosystems of the UPCT Javier Gilabert and Francisco López Castejón will embark at the end of the month, who will detail this afternoon the challenge to those attending the SIMIP congress hosted by the Polytechnic.
The project 'Exploring Fronts with Multiple Robots', in which besides the Polytechnic of Cartagena participate NASA and universities like Harvard, Columbia and Porto, is funded by the Schmidt Ocean Institute, a foundation that with its vessel R / V Falkor has carried out 46 oceanographic expeditions since 2013, with an extremely competitive selection of its members, to which a Spanish university had never previously agreed.
"It is a private research platform that is unique in the world," says Gilabert.
Researchers leave tomorrow for California, where they embark to face a double scientific objective, the exploration of the Subtropical Front, and technology, to coordinate the deployment of fifteen robots, both submarines, surface and air, operating 24 hours.
"Our underwater autonomous vehicle will search the convergence zones of ocean currents by means of salinity sensors, tracking where there is greater contrast," explains the researcher at the UPCT.
Other teams will take samples for metagenomic, optical and photosynthetic studies and on-board supercomputers will be used to execute complex hydrodynamic models.
"Sensors will be tested for the first time on Earth to measure DMS, a type of gas produced by marine phytoplankton, designed by NASA and that has only been tested on the International Space Station," says Gilabert, who also remembers that the The project is inspired by the 'open source' philosophy and the motto 'innovate, explore and share', so all the data will be public.
In order to disseminate the expedition, the researcher Javier Gilabert teaches this afternoon, at 5 pm in the School of Agronomists of the UPCT, a conference before the students of the Research Baccalaureate that participate in the SIMIP congress.
During the expedition they will also carry out videoconferences with the Cartagena institutes that participate in this initiative of the Scientific Culture Unit of the UPCT, which has the support of the Spanish Foundation for Science and Technology - Ministry of Economy, Industry and Competitiveness.
The UPCT has accessed this project thanks to its leadership in a European project that aims to create a community fleet of marine robotic vehicles to intervene in cases of environmental emergency.
The next joint exercise of European drones, which were already implemented in the Port of Cartagena to locate, will be in July in Ireland.
Source: UPCT
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