Fishing for Trace Metals

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December 14, 2016
 

On board the German research ship Meteor, two students and a guest scientist from Jacobs University are currently voyaging the South Atlantic. They are part of an international team of 28 scientists who are investigating the full water column distribution of dissolved and particulate trace elements and their isotopes (TEIs) along a near-shore and offshore north-south section of the Angola Basin and the northernmost Cape Basin.

The cruise is part of the international GEOTRACES program. One of the main scientific goals of the voyage is to investigate in detail the impact of continental inputs on TEI distribution, such as exchange with the SW African margin, dust input from the Namib desert, and the influence of the dissolved and particulate input of the major Congo and Orange rivers.

The excursion is the result of a successful application by Andrea Koschinsky, Professor of Geosciences at Jacobs University, and the GEOMAR Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research Kiel.

Photo courtesy of GEOMAR http://www.geomar.de