Black Sea cruise in the Istanbul Strait area

From 9-21 November 2009 a HYPOX research cruise is conducted using Istanbul Universities' Research Vessel "Arar". The work is carried out close to the mouth of the Istanbul Strait area within the Turkish economic zone of the Black Sea. The cruise is joined by HYPOX project partners from Istanbul University's Eastern Mediterranean Centre for Oceanography and Limnology (N. Çagatay, U. B. Ulgen, E. Damci, Z. Erdem), the Ukranian Institute of Biology of the Southern Seas (S. Mazlumyan, I.P. Bondarev) and the German Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology (M. Holtappels, A. Lichtschlag, G. Klockgether).

Fig. 1: the working area in the istanbul strait area (41.35°– 42.00°N and 29.00° E – 29.80° E)

The first objective of the cruise is to study the present and past oxygen conditions of the Black Sea area using geophysical subbottom profiling and sediment coring along transects from 70 m to 300 m water depth. The cores are analyzed for inorganic and organic proxies and benthic communities. The second objective is to study the effect of lateral intrusions of warm, saline, oxic Mediterranean waters on the biogeochemical cycling and microbiologic communities in the anoxic Black Sea water column. This will be done by a combination of chemical measurements and various 15N/13C incubation experiments.

Fig. 2: RV "Arar" of Istanbul University