Also this year the Italian Navy and, in particular, its Hydrographic Institute have organized, on board the ship “Alliance”, the scientific campaign “High North 19”.
The “High North 19” is a further proof of the persistent and growing importance that Italy attributes to the Arctic region, also because of the region’s increasingly stronger weight on the international agenda for the remarkable changes of climatic, environmental and geo-political nature that are taking place in the area with a significant impact also on other geographical regions.
The scientific campaign started in Tromsø, the northern “capital” of Norway, and went on from 27 October to 2 November, mainly in the waters south-west of Svalbard but touched also part of the Norwegian Sea and a portion of the Greenland Sea. It has covered a total of over 2300 nautical miles, has allowed the mapping of over 200 square kilometers of seabed (in some parts still unexplored) and has proceeded with the detection of scientific data on a journey of over 800 nautical miles.
Researchers and scientists from a number of Italian and foreign research institutions participated in the campaign. This year about fifteen of them represented major Italian research institutions involved in Arctic and polar researchsuch as the OGS, the CNR, the ENEA, the INGV, in addition to the NATO STO-CMRE, the European Research Institute (ERI) and the European Union Joint Research Center (JRC-EU).
From a scientific point of view, the “High North 19” campaign focused on continuing observations of the marine environment to study variations in the medium-long term and to compare the new data with the data collected in the previous missions; this was made through satellite tests all the way down until the seabed and the use of new technologies with multi-platform systems as well as the mapping of the seabed and environmental data sampling in 70 stations to detect acoustic measurements, marine pollution, the presence of micro-nano plastics and the bio-chemical characteristics of the water.
More photos of the campaign are available on:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/italyinnor_isl/albums/72157711733559166
