The Schooner Tara Sets Sail Again
On 2 April, the French schooner TARA set sail from Lorient with a rotating crew of 6 scientists, 6 sailors, 1 oceanographer and a ship’s correspondent for a new scientific expedition.
This expedition “Traversing European Coastline (TREC)”, aims to study, during two years, the consequences of pollutants on European marine ecosystems.
Under the scientific coordination of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL), this mission will consist of taking samples as close as possible to the coasts, at the land-sea interface, from the Baltic Sea to the Iberian Mediterranean peninsula.
The aim is to collect several hundred thousand polluting molecules linked to human activities, such as antibiotics, pesticides and metals, in order to compare the situation in urban and agricultural ecosystems with that in nature.
