The first major expedition for the new, £4.5 million ROV, Isis, is set to begin in mid-January and continue for about three weeks, run from the British Antarctic Survey ship RSS James Clark Ross.
Operations will centre on Marguerite Bay, on the northern Antarctic Peninsula. Isis will start in relatively shallow waters before moving to the edge of the continental shelf and descending a steep slope to the abyssal oceanic sea floor.
The study of seabed sediments will be overseen by Prof Julian Dowdeswell, Director of Cambridge University's Scott Polar Research Institute. That of marine creatures will be managed by Prof Paul Tyler, of the National Oceanography Centre in Southampton.
According to the BBC, Tyler will be interested in the effects of glaciers on the seabed and how this affects marine life. He will also study how animal life in Antarctica changes with depth. Among creatures the team expects to find are some well known to divers - starfish, sea-fans and sea cucumbers.
Dowdeswell, working with seabed surface and substructure bore samples, will be able to study sediments that include material deposited via ice sheets over periods of up to 20,000 years ago.
'The environmental history of the Antarctic is held in these sediments,' he told the BBC. |
