Scientists on Saturday began a five-month mission to study how plastic pollution in Africa's main rivers and climate change stresses are impacting microorganisms in the Atlantic ocean, they announced.
The survey is being staged from the 33-year-old Tara research schooner which arrived in South Africa's Cape Town on Friday ahead of the expedition up the West African coast.
The research station will also cast nets that can go up to 1,000 meters below the ocean's surface, to collect samples from ecosystems called"microbiomes", to be analyzed in labs on land. The data gathered will help answer key questions about the world's oceans. "Understanding that, and characterizing it at a microbiome level is something that hasn't been done really ever, and more importantly, it's not incorporated inShe said the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports published so far don't consider the microbiome,"yet without it, ocean life would not exist".
"There's very little data on this kind of microbiome, microscopic species, in this ecosystem," he said.
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