With 13,000 km and several days of travel ahead, the team of Galician scientists who are part of the 2017 Antarctic Campaign left Vigo this Friday afternoon for Madrid, to then fly to Santiago de Chile and then to Punta Arenas, where in a few days they will board the oceanographic ship Hespérides for Deception Island, which will be their home and laboratory for the next month. Marine Sciences researchers Mariano Lastra, Jesús Souza Troncoso and Jesús López, together with Luis Sampedro, from the CSIC, will develop there one of the projects selected by the Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness within the call for polar research of the 2016/2017 Antarctic Campaign.
If weather conditions are favorable, they expect to arrive at the Spanish base Gabriel de Castilla, on Deception Island, on the 10th, just one week after their departure from Galicia. And they will arrive aboard the oceanographic ship Hespérides, which, together with the BIO Sarmiento de Gamboa, has been in the area since the R&D campaign began in December, taking care of the deployment of the different scientific equipment and material during these months. The Galician researchers will remain in Antarctica until March 13, and during that month they will share accommodation and work spaces with other scientists from universities and R&D centers throughout the state and with the Army personnel who are responsible for maintaining the military base.
The effects of climate change on macroalgae
The project Ecological and biogeochemical processes associated with the decomposition of algae in sedimentary intertidal zones is coordinated by Professor Mariano Lastra and has a budget of 50,000 euros and a duration of three years. For the professor, this is the seventh expedition to the frozen continent, the second within this same project (another five were developed under the umbrella of two previous projects). Regarding the current study, the scientists from Vigo explain that “beaches are environments of low productivity, that is, they have very little marine and terrestrial vegetation, so the arrival of algae represents a food supply that sustains a good part of the food chain”. That is, the stranded algae serve as a refuge for a large number of small species and also help to conserve the beaches by accumulating a large amount of sand around them, which would otherwise be carried away by the wind and waves. These phenomena, widely studied in other areas of the planet, have not been so much on the Antarctic coast, and this is the germ of the Vigo project. The teachers emphasize that the previous data point to the ecological relevance of the stranding of these algae on the coast, linked to the enormous productivity of the Antarctic seas. The objective of the Galician team is to assess the importance of large Antarctic algae (macroalgae) in the ecology of the coast of Deception Island and the results they obtain may be extrapolated to large areas of the Antarctic coast that are ice-free during the summer.
For this research, the scientists highlight the importance of Deception Island being a “collapsed volcanic caldera system occupied by the sea” and this has as a consequence significant geothermal activity. This offers “very peculiar conditions in which polar climatology, biological richness and volcanism are combined, something difficult to find in other areas of the planet”. The study will analyse the decomposition process of algae in areas where there is volcanic heating, and the results will help to interpret the major changes that Antarctica is undergoing in terms of climate change. In fact, one of the aspects to which the Galician team will pay the most attention will be the emissions of greenhouse gases during the decomposition processes of algae, since the forecast is that the presence of these gases in the atmosphere will increase significantly in the coming decades, a phenomenon that is especially evident and worrying in polar environments.
Source: duvi
