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.