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QuERCi II

1 Jun 2016

UCC scientists, as part of an international team, including Prof. Andy Wheeler (Chief Scientists) are returning form a week long survey of the Porcupine Bank Canyon, 400+ kilometres west of Galway. It is a follow up to the successful QuERCi I survey undertaken last year.

You can read about more about the trip on the .

Before leaving, Prof. Andy Wheeler spoke about some of the aims of the survey:

"Submarine canyons link surface waters to the deep ocean and are routes of rapid exchange. They are in short dynamic settings and vital connection pathways in our oceans. They are biodiverse and support significant populations, but they are immense and hard to study. We hope to use cold-water corals as archives of environmental change to unravel these environments."

"On this survey we will use the Holland I ROV to collect coral samples. Rather like trees, coral have growth rings and we have been looking at chemical signals laid down by the rings as proxies for ocean temperature and nutrients. The new samples form key locations will help us understand the nature of change on a decadal scale but spatial variations as we go into the canyon. We will also be trialling a new gravity corer hoping to get several metre long corals through the canyon muds, coral debris fields and from one of the coral mounds. We hope these will tell us how this environment changes through time over 100s to 1000s of years in response to change ocean climate. All of these studies help us to understand more about how oceans change and how submarine canyon environments respond."

The top 3 highlight discoveries during the QuERCI II survey

— Marine Institute (@MarineInst)