7 July 2021
Gombessa 6: Cap Corse
The new Gombessa expedition began on 1 July.
After Gombessa 5: Mediterranean Planet in July 2019, the “Gombessa 6: Cap Corse ” expedition, led by Laurent Ballesta and the Andromeda Oceanology team, is once again dedicated to the Big Blue. This new adventure to discover the deep sea, which began in May, is supported by the Principality of Monaco, the Prince Albert II of Monaco Foundation and Monaco Explorations. The final phase began on 1st July and is being conducted from the bathyal station installed on the INPP barge, from which the four Aquanauts of Gombessa 6 will explore the deep sea for 18 days in saturation. It will end on Tuesday 20 July 2021 in the port of Monaco, where the Gombessa 6 flotilla will dock after a two-day crossing from Cap Corse. During these two days of sailing, the divers will decompress inside the bathyal station.
In the meantime, new and exciting pages of scuba diving and exploration of the Mediterranean will have been written.
Unlocking the secrets of Cap Corse...
The Gombessa expeditions aim to bear witness, through innovative diving methods, to the inaccessible mysteries of the underwater world. The secret waters of Cap Corse and the eastern coast are full of them… The essential motivations of this new expedition, Laurent Ballesta and his companions draw them from the two major objectives they have set for themselves in this new adventure:
– The first is to better understand, and then better preserve, the last population of angel sharks in the French Mediterranean, the now endangered sharks that gave their name to the Baie des Anges in Nice,
– The second is to solve the scientific enigma of the origin and diversity of deep coralligenous “atolls”.
The deep-sea atolls...
The most attractive thing under the sea is not the beauty but the mysteries... When I saw these strange sunken atolls, I was hallucinating, it was science fiction. I thought I was descending on the Nazca lines.
The interest of deep diving
The interest of deep saturation dives from the bathyal station, tested in the summer of 2019 during the Gombessa 5 expedition, makes it possible in July 2021 to exploit the possibilities offered by extended dive times to make progress in solving the scientific enigma of the origin, formation, and diversity of these deep coralligenous atolls off Cap Corse. What do these deep circular formations hide? The hypothesis of their origin, linked for example to gaseous formations, remains to be confirmed. Gombessa 6 should provide new answers…
The last angel sharks
The emblematic angel shark, officially classified as critically endangered by the IUCN, was observed and photographed by Laurent Ballesta last summer in the posidonia meadows of the eastern coast of Corsica, at a depth of 40 metres. Corsica is therefore the last known refuge for this species in the French Mediterranean. In parallel with the saturation dives, mapping tools and innovative biodiversity sampling methods are being deployed throughout this expedition to discover where the angel shark lives and the extent and size of the population in Corsica.
Since 14 December 2018, when the 3rd session of the Meeting of the Signatories of the Memorandum of Understanding on Migratory Sharks was held in Monaco, the angel shark has been included in the list of species that should benefit from enhanced conservation measures at the international level, particularly in the Mediterranean.
Specimen of angel shark, Squatina squatina, photographed in the Canaries in December 2020 © Magali Boussion
Sharing results
Laurent Ballesta and Julie Deter, scientific leader of the expedition, presented the study underway in Corsica and the first observations made during the International Angelfish Day on Saturday 26 June.
At the end of the expedition, all the scientific data will be used to develop a management tool for the preservation of coralligenous atolls and the conservation of the angel shark habitat in Corsica and more widely in the Mediterranean.
2020 September, 28
The Principality of Monaco supports the Argo program
The Principality of Monaco supports the multidisciplinary development of the Argo programme, a leading programme for ocean observation
Since August 2020, Monaco Explorations has been collaborating in the development and consolidation of the Argo program and its biogeochemical component (BGC-Argo), as part of the Global Ocean Observing System (GOOS). This support is reflected in the financing of a program office located at the Oceanographic Museum of Monaco and with a project manager based at the Institut de la Mer de Villefranche (IMEV), which is supervised by the CNRS and Sorbonne University. The position is directly attached to the JCOMMOPS centre of the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) and the Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission (IOC) of UNESCO.
The main task of the project manager will be to organise the BGC-Argo programme and to develop strong synergies with other ocean observation programmes, particularly in the Mediterranean region. This funding constitutes an important contribution by the Principality of Monaco to world oceanography and its governance, with a view to sustainable management of the Ocean.
BGC-Argo: a new generation of multi-disciplinary autonomous floats for a better understanding of the Ocean
Since 2000, the international Argo programme, under the aegis of the IOC and the WMO, has been monitoring the temperature and salinity of the World Ocean over the long term using autonomous robots (profiling floats). The instruments go on 10-day cycles during which they dive to depths of up to 2000 metres and drift with the currents, then return to the surface and transmit their data by satellite before setting off on a new dive. In 2019, Argo defined its strategic vision for the next 10 years based on three components that together will enable it to deploy and operate a fleet of 4,000 instruments: core-Argo, which extends the initial programme, deep-Argo, which extends observations to the deep ocean (6,000 m), and Biogeochemical-Argo (BGC-Argo).
Launched in 2016, BGC-Argo aims to establish a network of 1,000 new-generation profiling floats measuring six additional variables essential to understanding biogeochemical processes and their evolution: concentrations of chlorophyll, suspended particles, dissolved oxygen and nitrate, pH and underwater illumination. BGC-Argo is led by a body co-chaired in France by Hervé Claustre, CNRS research director at IMEV and in the United States by Ken Johnson, senior scientist at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute.
All the data collected are made available to the international scientific community in real time in the form of Open Data and are analysed in several reference laboratories. The two main responsibilities of the future project leader will be to promote and develop BGC-Argo at the international level and to integrate the regional Mediterranean observation systems.
Many ocean areas still not covered
In order to cover the whole of the World Ocean and better understand its functioning and evolution, additional floats need to be deployed. In collaboration with Hervé Claustre, Monaco Explorations is planning to help to deploy several floats in relatively unknown areas, involving the training of local experts and encouraging outreach among young people, notably by supporting the “Adopt a float ” initiative.
