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he Arctic Ocean is one of the most remote locations on Earth and the area where the impact of climate change may be most strongly expressed. In the Chukchi Borderlands (CBL) area, water masses from the Arctic, Pacific and Atlantic oceans meet and interact over tremendously complex bottom topography, creating intricate currents and sea ice drifts. It is also the region of the most dramatic summer sea ice meltdown in the last decades. This project is a multi-disciplinary group effort to explore marine communities from microbes to mammals and from sea ice to seafloor in this poorly known, bathymetrically and hydrographically complex Arctic region. We will use a combination of photographic mapping using ROV, physical sampling, and state-of-the-art metagenomics to assess the diversity of this region. Field work involves a ~30-day icebreaker cruise in the summer of 2016, with use of the ROV Global Explorer that provides unique opportunities to capture fragile pelagic organisms and observe benthic fauna in relation to the bathymetric and geomorphological features of the seafloor. |
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