2024-10-08 12:54:08
After an 18-month tour in European waters – from Tallinn to Athens, researchers from the schooner “Tara” docked in the French port of Lorient with data that promises “several decades of discoveries” for science, reported AFP, quoted by BTA.
“This thirteenth mission is without a doubt the most complex that we have undertaken with the Tara team,” said Romain Treubly, director general of the Tara Ocean Foundation, at a press conference on the island of Gros, where the science vessel stopped before docking in Lorient .
The ship, designed by explorer Jean-Louis Etienne, set sail in April 2023 to embark on a journey of more than 24,000 km along the European coast.
The originality of this journey, crossing the Atlantic Ocean, the English Channel, the North Sea, the Baltic Sea and the Mediterranean Sea, lies in the fact that it is part of a wider mission called TREC (“Traverser les cotes europeennes”). The expedition involved 200 researchers from 30 countries under the auspices of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory based in Heidelberg, Germany.
Over the past 18 months, researchers have carried out systematic sampling from land to sea along imaginary lines along the coast of Europe: in soil, in sediments, in marine and terrestrial aerosols, in crystals and in the sea.
It’s a universe that’s unfolding before us,” said Edith Hurd, director of the European Laboratory for Molecular Biology.