Aug 11, 2011

A little more about our project

Cruise rute from Tuxpan (Mexico) to the Yucatan Strait
The cruise's focal objective was to obtain sediment samples—by gravity and box core retrieval—from depths between 500 and 2000m along the Yucatán Strait,which is an ocean channel extending for 217 km between Cabo Catoche (Mexico) and Cabo San Antonio (Cuba). This strait represents the boundary between the Caribbean Sea and the Gulf of Mexico.
Oceanographically speaking, this is a very interesting area, where water masses advecting from the Caribbean Current, derived from the North and South Equatorial Current, enter the Gulf of Mexico to form the Loop Current, outlining the foundation of the Gulf Stream. Thus, sediments from the Strait of Yucatan may contain a record of the past oceanographic variability that affected the strength and characteristics of the Gulf Stream in previous times.

With sediment from our cores, we are working towards generating a multi-proxy record of high resolution to reconstruct past climate and oceanographic variability in this region.

Finalcial support from this cruise was provided by the Dansk Center for Havforskning (Danish Center for Marine Research)  in their 2010 applicatuion for ship-time funding.

Aug 5, 2011

NEWS

After some months without any updates on the blog it's time to start posting again. We've started the analyses of the recovered cores and it's now time to tell you about it. Also,  we have made some changes to the blog:
1. To make it easier for everybody to understand what we did during the cruise, we've decided to translate all entries regarding the trip to English (you can still find the original version, in Danish, German or Spanish, as a comment to each particular entry) .
2. We are also starting a series of notes about each one of the participants. Once a week I'll post some info about one researcher or student, telling you about them, what they do and where are they now.
3. You will also find new pictures from before, during and after the cruise. We plan to change this pictures at least one a month.