When the last of a total of five glider robots was pulled from the South Pacific on May 5, 2010, the scientists from the Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences (IFM-GEOMAR) in Kiel were more than satisfied. Equipped with state-of-the-art sensors, the gliders by US manufacturer Teledyne Webb Research had made a total of 3,500 dives to a depth of 1,000 metres over a period of two months. During that time, they made no less than 18 million measurements – of temperature, salt content, chlorophyll, cloudiness and oxygen. “Thanks to close cooperation with Teledyne Webb Research we have now achieved the required reliability and precision with these measurements,” commented Gerd Krahmann, oceanographer at IFM-GEOMAR. The next large-scale glider swarm experiment is scheduled to take place in summer 2011.
The scientists in Kiel are also benefiting from North American high technology in the shape of ABYSS, the autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) produced by the Hydroid company in Massachusetts. It is based on REMUS technology developed by the American Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, a partner institution of IFM-GEOMAR, and contributes towards the mapping of the sea floor. ABYSS has already completed more than 50 dives for IFM-GEOMAR. On its 50th dive in August 2010, for example, it examined the distribution of oxygen in the deep sea with the help of a new microstructure probe from the Canadian company Rockland Scientific. That ABYSS could be combined with other technical systems was already clear in 2009 during an exploration of the Lilliput hydrothermal field on the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. The remote-controlled deep-sea robot ROV KIEL 6000, produced by US company Schilling Robotics, was able to provide IFM-GEOMAR scientists with video images of much better quality because ABYSS had previously mapped the sea bed at a depth of 1,500 metres with the aid of a high-definition echo sounder. In December 2010, ABYSS received a special commendation: it was the first AUV to be certified by the ship classification society Germanischer Lloyd for water depths of 6,000 meters – and can now be deployed on all research ships without restriction.////
