POSEIDON POS518/1

The research cruise POS518 with the German RV POSEIDON (Leg 1 and 2) is related to a recently (March 2016) started EU project: “Strategies for Environmental Monitoring of Marine Carbon Capture and Storage” STEMM-CCS (http://www.stemm-ccs.eu/), coordinated by Prof. Connelly, NERC/NOCS.

Contributions to the main aims of STEMM-CCS supported by this cruise are:

(1) Pre-define and measure sensitive and robustly measurable environmental background variables, which are also indicative for subsea CO2 leakage, prior to offshore CO2 storage operations. (2) Provide water column measurements of trace gases, nutrients, and carbonate chemistry variables to assess baseline conditions in the study region. Collect geochemical porewater data to provide a quantitative, process-based interpretation of porewater and benthic fluxes by state-of-the-art numerical model, collected under natural (baseline) conditions. The baseline data is also needed for comparison with data obtained during artificial CO2-release experiments, which will be conducted in 2018 in the same area. (3) Test of newly designed benthic chambers, novel chemical sensors, and hydroacoustic detection systems for measuring benthic and pelagic carbon fluxes (i.e. by using lab-on-the-chip technology, optodes, membrane inlet mass spectrometry, 3D-visual bubble imaging, and (multibeam)echosounder quantification.