The PERLE-2 campaign (PI: P. Conan), aboard the NO/ Pourquoi Pas? has just come to an end (21 February - 22 March 2019). On board, an international team of 40 researchers (25 French from LOMIC, MIO, LOV and CEFREM) and 15 foreigners (Greeks, Italians, Israelis and Americans) shared the water from more than 120 CTD profiles. A dense network of 97 stations crossing the Crete Sea (in the Aegean) and criss-crossing the Libyan Sea (in the Levantine basin) was surveyed during the campaign (see map). The MIO was particularly involved in the study of the carbonate cycle (with Thierry Moutin and Cathy Wimar-Rousseau, Thibaut Wagener's doctoral student, on board) and phosphate (nanomolar assays and labile fraction of DOP), ectoenzymatic activities and heterotrophic bacterial production (with Florian Voron, M2 student, Elvira Pulido, France Van Wambeke and Sophie Guasco), zooplankton (Francois Carlotti) and physics (Nagib Bhairy).
This campaign is part of a project (PERLE for Pelagic Ecosystem response in the Levant Experiment) of the MISTRALS- MERMEX programme, which aims to describe the formation and dispersion of intermediate levantine water (LIW), and determine its role in the structuring of planktonic ecosystems in the eastern Mediterranean. Four offshore cruises are designed to study the key periods of the annual cycle from both a physical and biogeochemical point of view. These periods are pre-conditioning (PERLE 0 and 1 campaigns which took place in summer and October 2018), the formation of dense waters by mixing (this PERLE 2 campaign) and the dispersion of LIW (PERLE 3 campaign planned for 2019). These comprehensive but discrete observations are supplemented by a set of physical and biogeochemical parameters collected by autonomous platforms (mooring lines; profiling floats; gliders; drifting buoys), satellite imagery, and other oceanographic campaigns conducted by the Greek, Turkish and Israeli partners. All of this will make it possible to test and improve modelling on a regional scale (Levantine basin), as well as on a large scale (Mediterranean). See and interact on the PERLE twitter account created by Laurent Coppola https://twitter.com/PERLE_cruises