Back to the Deep: Woods Hole to Send Nereus to New Trench

Photo courtesy Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.

 

By Danielle Lucey

 

The Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution is going to send its hybrid remotely operated vehicle Nereus to explore marine life in the Kermadec Trench, offsore the northeastern tip of New Zealand’s North Island.

 

The 40-day expedition, possible through a National Science Foundation grant, will start 12 April, with the goal of comparing what Nereus finds in the trench, which bottoms out at 10,047 meters deep, to the sealife an a nearby abyssal plain, which typically measure between 3,000 and 6,000 meters deep. The Kermadec Trench is the fifth deepest in the world and also one of the coldest, with waters originating from Antarctica flowing into the deepwater area.

 

"We know relatively little about life in our ocean trenches — the deepest marine habitat on Earth,” says WHOI deep-sea biologist Tim Shank. “We didn't have the technology to do these kind of detailed studies before. "This will be a first-order look at community structure, adaptation, and evolution—how life exists in the trenches."

 

This won’t be Nereus’ first dip into a pressure-heavy trench — the system completed a dive into the Mariana Trench in 2009, reaching 10,902 meters on that voyage.

 

Over the course of the trip, the scientists hope to research 15 stations, from shallow to abyssal and trench axis waters, comparing the sites to see how animal metabolisms function at each of the depths and to look at microbial activity at full-ocean water depths. The fiber-optic tether ROV will be reinvestigating the area, which was originally sniffed out by the University of Aberdeen Oceanlab’s Hadal-Lander technology.

 

UA is part of an interdisciplinary team working with Woods Hole on the project, which also includes researchers from the University of Hawaii, Whitman College, the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research, and the National Oceanography Centre at the University of Southampton.

 

"The bulk of our knowledge of trenches is only from snapshot visits using mostly trawls and camera landers," Shank says. "Only detailed systematic studies will advance our biological understanding and also reveal the role trenches may play as the final location of where most of the carbon and other chemicals get sequestered in our ocean, which ultimately impacts the global carbon budget and climate. That's what makes this project so exciting.”