Voyage Number
IN2025_V02
Voyage Dates
Voyage Location
Chief Scientist
Dr Elizabeth Shadwick
Institution
IMOS
Watch our livestream from RV Investigator's 22-day research voyage into the Southern Ocean.
Voyage summary
Research voyage to the Southern Ocean to maintain long-term deep-water automated moorings for monitoring of ocean and climate.
This voyage will contribute to global data sets and increase understanding of Southern Ocean characteristics, variability and processes. The Southern Ocean Time Series (SOTS) moorings provide year-long observations in a critical part of the Southern Ocean, where ocean interactions are most intense and least studied. This is information vital for informing ocean and climate modelling.
The primary voyage objective is to recover the existing SOTS moorings (SOFS-13 and SAZ-26) and deploy two new SOTS moorings (SOFS-14 and SAZ-27). An additional objective is to recover the ACC-SWOT mooring at 55°S site, which was deployed on voyage IN2023_V07.
There are 6 other projects included on this voyage:
- Survey of basketwork eels on Patience seamount (Dr Ben Scoulding, CSIRO): Deep towed camera and acoustic survey of basketwork eel population on Patience Seamount in Huon Marine Park.
- Evolution of the seafloor of the Australian-Antarctic Southern Ocean (Phil Vandenbossche, UTAS): Acquisition of targeted seafloor bathymetry and towed magnetometer data.
- Southern Ocean Winter Cloud Interactions Processes – SOWCLIP (Alain Protat, BOM): Launch weather ballons to obtain data about cloud microphysical properties to improve weather modelling.
- Profiling echosounder (Pete Jansen, CSIRO): Deployment of profiling echo sounder, attached to profiling float, to collect data to investigate Southern Ocean ecosystem function.
- Natural Iron Fertilisation of the Southern Ocean (Andy Bowie, UTAS): Multi-voyage research project investigating the deposition of iron‐rich aerosols from Australia into surface ocean waters.
- Quantifying dust fluxes in the Southern Ocean Time Series (George Rowland, UTAS): Using thorium isotopes to quantify the flux of mineral dust and nutrients supplied to the Southern Ocean.
SOTS is part of the Integrated Marine Observing System (IMOS), a global monitoring program to collect long time-series ocean data to better understand ocean and climate change and variability.
The science team will have 21 science participants representing 3 institutions, and the voyage includes 21 ship crew from MMA Offshore Ltd.
Voyage outcomes
Voyage outcomes will be published approximately 3-6 months after the completion of the voyage.