POSEIDON POS408/2

The 408th expedition (13 January – 3 March 2011) of the German research vessel POSEIDON takes place in the Red Sea. The cruise which is divided into three legs is part of the Jeddah Transect Project. The Red Sea is a marginal sea of up to 360 km width and 2240 km in length. It is an emerging ocean basin where the same conditions can be found as presumably prevailed in the Atlantic Ocean when it opened up many million years ago. The 2000 metre deep-sea trench is also an outstanding biotope because of the coral reefs, rich in species, which are lining it. Within the Jeddah Transect Project, a co-operation with the King Abdulaziz University in Jeddah (Saudi Arabia), joint biological, geological and geophysical studies will be performed in a working area that reaches from the coast to the trench axis at two kilometres depth. A large range of subjects will be covered, such as coastal protection, the ecology of fish/ coral communities, venting of gas and fluids on submarine slopes and examinations of the deep basins in the central Red Sea, which contain vast resources of minerals.