Overview

• The expedition runs September 30 to October 29 aboard the RV Falkor (too), first working off Viedma at the Bahía Blanca canyons and then off Rawson at the Almirante Brown canyons.
• Oceanographer Silvia Romero of the Naval Hydrographic Service and UBA leads a multi-institutional team supported by Schmidt Ocean Institute, Fundación Williams, SHN, INIDEP and CONICET institutes.
• The study targets how canyon topography influences cross-shelf water exchange, focusing on canyons that cut the upper continental margin rather than the blind Mar del Plata system explored earlier.
• Researchers will deploy a fixed oceanographic buoy with sensors, GPS-tracked drifters, the ROV SuBastian and other autonomous vehicles, while collecting plankton, water and sediment samples for later lab analysis.
• Operations are being streamed in real time on the Schmidt Ocean Institute YouTube channel, following a prior campaign that drew about 18 million views and yielded specimens suggesting more than forty potential new species now under study.