Special Projects
Click on the map to see the Tara's route
Departure from Lorient
Tara
Tara Oceans Expedition
Setting sail: EMBL takes to the oceans
In September 2009, after months of planning and preparation, a very special ship set sail from Lorient in France to a riotous send-off. The vessel was Tara, a 120-ton schooner; her voyage will last three years and make about sixty different stops across the globe; and the brains behind the enterprise is EMBL’s Senior Scientist Eric Karsenti.
The Tara Oceans expedition aims to study biodiversity and climate, the functioning of marine ecosystems and life’s origins and evolution to try to answer one of the most critical questions of our time: will marine life be able to survive major ecological upheavals such as global warming and pollution? Are we heading towards a huge and potentially devastating transformation of ocean life as we know it?
“The microscopic life in the oceans remains one of the least explored fields of science, while the wealth of its biodiversity is considerable,” says Eric, who’s coordinating a team of scientists from 50 laboratories in 15 countries with the help of the president of the Tara Expeditions foundation, Etienne Bourgois. “The ocean gave birth to life, and life on earth still depends on it. Our own future depends on the safeguarding of the sea.”
EMBL’s innovative technologies on board
Eric Karsenti and Etienne Bourgois have brought together a unique international and multidisciplinary scientific team of oceanographers, biologists, geneticists and physicists. Among the EMBL scientists doing research on Tara will be Detlev Arendt, Ernst Stelzer and Peer Bork, while alumnus Emmanuel Reynaud, now at University College Dublin, will be coordinating the onboard Tara Oceans Marine biology Imaging platform, which includes EMBL’s SPIM technology. The EMBL imaging platform supervised by Rainer Pepperkok and Jan Ellenberg provides support for the development of high throughput FISH analysis of plankton species.