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A new adventure for the Tara Ocean Foundation: it should launch its polar station in 2025. Its oval boat, 26 meters long and 14 meters wide, will carry out scientific research on the Arctic throughout the year. An unprecedented project.
The French Tara Ocean Foundation announced on Tuesday June 21 the deployment of its polar station by 2025, a drifting laboratory whose mission will be to collect data on global warming and biodiversity in the Arctic Ocean.
Romain Troublé, general manager of the foundation, clarifies at the microphone of our journalist Marion Pivert: “ Today finally in the Arctic we do not really understand what lives there, we do not understand how it works, we do not understand how it will change… What we do know is that climate change is three times more important than elsewhere. »
A boat full of technologies
The “Polar Station”, qualified as the “watchtower of the North Pole”, will be able to accommodate up to twenty crew members in summer and twelve in winter, for drifts of 500 days in the middle of the Arctic ice, and will be propelled by carbon-free energy. The missions will be multiple, and the tools numerous.
« We will first seek to know this ecosystem which is undoubtedly endemic to the planet: it only exists there. Understand how this organism adapts to this fairly rapid climate change: this is done with sensors that are sent to the bottom of the sea, with aerial drones that can go and take ice and light measurements up to 200- 300 kilometers from the resort “, details Romain Troublé.
The researchers and the crew will not be pampered, and will have to have strong nerves: ” The start of the mission will last seven months non-stop in polar cold conditions, with polar nights between September and March, a permanent night, it is a commitment “, admits the director general of the foundation.
The cost of designing the “Polar Station” amounts to 18 million euros, a budget “ already completed “, he told AFP. The French state is contributing 13 million euros from France’s polar strategy budget.
(And with AFP)
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