Departure of the Tara mission, a 2-year scientific expedition in the Atlantic
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The schooner "Tara" set sail on Saturday from Lorient, the ship is heading for Punta Arenas in southern Chile.
© Romain Trouble
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A two-year expedition, 70,000 km, is a new round-the-world trip for the scientific schooner "Tara", which sets out this time to analyze the "microbiome" of the ocean, that is to say the set of microorganisms that inhabit the South Atlantic, to understand how they react to climate change.
The schooner set sail on Saturday from Lorient (in Morbihan).
The ship, 36 meters long and 10 meters wide, heads straight for Punta Arenas in southern Chile, where the first scientists will embark in February.
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Described at the end of the 19th century by the German biologist Ernst Haeckel, and widely listed thanks to the previous Tara Oceans mission, these microorganisms represent "at least two thirds of all the biomass of the oceans", that is to say four times more than the biomass. cumulative amount of all insects on Earth, Chris Bowler, scientific director of the Tara Ocean consortium, told AFP.
But of their operation, we ignore everything.
The challenge for Tara Microbiome is therefore to probe the “theater of activity” of this microbial life, essential to the entire oceanic ecosystem, and which constitutes the first link in the food chain.
The expedition site
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