Tara en Mer du Nord: sous le pont Alexandre III jusqu’au 1er février 2009
Description of the Tara Oceans expedition
The Tara Arctic expedition has strongly demonstrated the reality of global warming.
The next question is obvious: what will be the impact on life and on human society? The sudden increase in atmospheric CO2 is beginning to affect the oceans which are going through acidification. How will the micro-organisms in the ocean that produce oxygen for the atmosphere react to these sudden changes? Will they evolve, adapt or die?
The next Tara expedition, Tara-Oceans, leaves in search for an answer to these questions. A journey across all the oceans of the world: from the tropical coral atolls to Antarctica, from the Middle Eastern isthmus to the north-west passage.
This expedition will call at strategic sites where ocean life is disrupted, but where it may also show signs of unexpected evolution.
An international team of oceanographers, biologists and physicists belonging to the best laboratories in the world will leave to meet an unknown “population”: the multitude of microscopic sea species that constitute the core of the terrestrial climate reactor. Without these small species, humans would have never seen the light of day, without them they will disappear.
The ship will be equipped with the most advanced technologies, including several new instruments to explore the diversity of oceanic forms and genomes. Thus the mass of data collected during Tara-Oceans journeys will illuminate the subtle relations between genomes, organisms and ecosystems.
And the widely distributed and carefully filed results, at the dawn of the third millennium, will serve as reference for future generations.
Filmmakers, journalists and educators will follow this exceptional adventure, worthy of the largest expeditions of the 19th century, but with the technology of the 21st century, so that human kind may inherit it.
The Tara Oceans expedition is led by Eric Karsenti, Cell Biology program coordinator at EMBL and Etienne Bourgois, director of Tara Expeditions.