The three-week expedition aboard NIWA's flagship research vessel Tangaroa involves scientists from Denmark, Germany, the United Kingdom, Chile and New Zealand, who will investigate the biogeochemistry and biology at the bottom of the 10,000m deep trench.
Trenches represent some of the most remote and scarcely explored areas on Earth. The southernmost part of the Kermadec Trench begins about 120km off the coast of New Zealand, and extends northeast for 1500km. The team will deploy sophisticated cameras and instruments that will image and monitor conditions along the trench axis.
Prof Ronnie N. Glud from University of Southern Denmark, who is leading the research project, says that one of the main challenges investigating the biogeochemistry, microbiology and fauna from great depth is that changes in pressure and temperature strongly affect the samples.
The science team has developed different autonomous instruments, that once released from the ship, sink to the bottom and conduct preprogrammed experiments and measurements. Once the mission has been completed the instrument returns to the surface with data and samples after 1-3 days of operation. These efforts are combined with more traditional approaches to recover sediment and water samples when less pressure sensitive parameters are being investigated.
The expedition has been years in the planning and is funded by the European Research Council (ERC) and by NIWA. The voyage is the first in a series of expedition targeting three different trench systems in the Pacific, each experiencing different loads of organic material that sustain the processes and activity in the deep. The Kermadec Trench, which is situated in the proposed Kermadec Ocean Sanctuary, is the first of the trenches to be visited by the research team in this project.