Spring diving campaign

After feasibility studies in 2011 (Pre-Apolobis project), the team from LEMAR Plouzané FRANCE (UMR6539 - B.B.  Polar - Laurent Chauvaud, Joelle Richard & Erwan Amice) and IMR Bergen NORWAY (Havforskingsinstituttet - Øivind  Strand & Tore Strohmeier) come in spring and later in autumn with next step project, SCALA: Scallops in the Arctic, taping of environmental parameters. Carrying on research on Iceland scallop and enhancement of the benthic chambers installed in Kongsfjordneset (already measuring temperature, salinity, pressure, turbidity, current, oxygen and fluorescence) additional instruments are installed to observe animals behaviour (accelerometers and passive acoustic sensors). Arctic bivalve, Iceland scallop (Chlamys islandica), has a life time of a couple of decades and growths daily lines on their shell that can be used as chronological landmarks (sclerochronology) together with sclerochemistry to depict environmental variations high frequency resolution: relevant proxies are δ13C (Metabolism, Primary production, Salinity), δ18O (Temperature, Salinity), Mg/Ca (Temperature), Sr/Ca (Growth, Temperature), Ba/Ca (Phytoplankton biomass, Salinity), Li/Ca (Phytoplankton biomass, Growth), Mo/Ca (Phytoplankton dynamics). The team from LEMAR performed correlated studies on the same group of mollusc in Antarctica, in Roadstead of Brest, New Caledonia and Mexico. During diving exploration in Kongsfjord, they found Astarte spp., another bivalve they study in Bafin Sea. Whereas Chlamys islandica can record the environmental variations at the daily scale Astarte spp. can live as long as a century and record these variations at the annual scale.