RV Tangaroa left Wellington at 4pm yesterday with an international group of 38 scientists and crew for an eight-day transit to the Ross Sea.
University of Otago marine science head of department Prof Miles Lamare is one of five aboard from Otago who will take part in what will ultimately be a roughly six-week scientific expedition.
Prof Lamare, who is a principal investigator for the New Zealand Antarctic Science Platform, said the Ross Sea boasted diverse ecosystems with life that had evolved within the cold Antarctic environment.
"These ecosystems are largely untouched," he said.
"They’re really undisturbed and intact ecosystems and amazingly diverse as you go through.
"Just about every inch of the sea floor will be covered in life."
The aim of the Antarctic Science Platform was to understand how the Ross Sea might respond to warming and loss of sea ice, including changes in the makeup of the ice and water temperatures.
But researchers were also very interested in understanding how the ecosystems in the changing environment responded, he said.
The programme’s focus over the last five years had been on trying to increase the scientific understanding on where species were distributed and how they were distributed, but also they were shaped by things such as sea ice cover, water temperatures and water chemistry.
"If we know how they’re shaped now, we can then start to try and model and predict how they might respond if there’s a reduction in sea ice, which we’re already seeing, and as sea temperatures warm, or say the oceans take up more carbon dioxide in that region," Prof Lamare said.
High-resolution cameras would be towed across the seafloor to record the animal and plant life at different depths.
And once the area was captured and mapped, instruments would be left behind to monitor temperature, seawater, chemistry and ocean currents until they were collected in a couple of years.
While much of the data would only be "baseline data", there was a legacy of scientific work in the region that dated back to the voyages of Robert Scott and Ernest Shackleton.
Sites where they had collected material would also be revisited, he said.
Natural History Museum marine invertebrates curator Hugh Carter, who was making his first trip to the Ross Sea, said the bulk of the London museum’s Ross Sea collection had been collected from 1899 to 1913.
The trip offered a chance to compare what was there now to what was there about 120 years ago.
"The animals that are there: are they the same, are they different, have they been changing, have they got bigger, have they got smaller, have they got fatter, thinner?
"Hopefully we’ll try and do some genetic work on them, as well, to look at ‘has the population been bigger or smaller in the past?’."
The expedition is being led by Niwa oceanographers Prof Craig Stevens and Dr Denise Fernandez.
Prof Stevens said this trip would take Tangaroa the farthest south the research vessel had ever been.
It would enter waters experiencing record-breaking low sea ice conditions.
"This lack of ice is having knock-on effects for not only the regional ocean but the whole planet."
