Horizontal Activities

Technology: Developing Marine Science Technologies

Changing views and new approaches in ocean studies require a timely development of adequate techniques and methods. This has been the rationale for including the horizontal activity “Development and technologies” in the NEBROC program. During meetings and workshops, several marine research fields have been identified that would benefit strongly from new technological or methodological developments. Three of the ongoing initiatives started during NEBROC phase I will be summarized here:

MOVE!
Within the scientific community of NEBROC, it was recognized that mainly due to a lack of suitable equipment and consequently of restrictive ocean research strategies, marine science has failed to develop a realistic view on dynamics, diversity and functioning of benthic ecosystems, especially in the abyssal habitat. Several of the scientific issues that need to be addressed for improving our comprehension would require the application of an autonomous vehicle (AUV) in order to overcome the limitations of current techniques such as static benthic landers. read more

XRF Scanner
An XRF (X-Ray Fluorescence) Core Scanner has previously been developed at Royal NIOZ for rapid, high resolution measurements of major elements in split sediment cores, with a second instrument now being in Bremen. The technique facilitates the correlation between sediment cores from different geographic origin and a reconstruction of sedimentary and climatic conditions on geological time scales. An improved version of the XRF Core Scanner with increased sensitivity for lighter chemical elements, such as Al, Si, P, and S, has been developed at AVAATECH (Texel)and is available in Bremen since 2002. read more

PANGAEA
The network of geological and environmental data PANGAEA is an information system for processing, long term storage, and publication of geo-referenced data related to earth science fields. This system has been used within the first phase of NEBROC for data management and the distribution of visualisation and analysis software. Organisation of data management includes quality control and publication of data and the dissemination of meta data according to international standards. Data managers are responsible for acquisition and maintenance of data. The data model used reflects the information processing steps in the earth science fields and can handle any related analytical data.